Jupiter Ascending is a film with all of the usual trappings of the Hero of a Thousand Faces narrative—an unremarkable underdog thrust into the great fire of destiny, with outcast advisors and monomaniacal villains peppered throughout the journey—rendered as something wholly unrecognizable through sheer incomprehensibility. With its made-up future-speak and constant willful turns away from narrative cohesion, the project takes on the feel of a Joseph Campbell mad lib, a familiar skeleton structure populated by whatever whims its makers felt like using for pointless disruption.
Andy and Lana Wachowski establish Jupiter (Mila Kunis) as a child born under a bad sign, delivered in a cargo container bound for the U.S. by a Russian mother fleeing from tragedy, and forced as an illegal immigrant to spend long, miserable days cleaning up for the rich for a pittance. But soon, too soon to make any sense, Jupiter discovers that she is the reincarnation of an alien oligarch, a revelation that thrusts into the incestuous corporate war of an elite alien family squabbling over the deed to Earth and all its inhabitants, who exist to be farmed for a fountain-of-youth potion for intergalactic bougies. But wait, there’s more: act fast and you’ll get a clumsy, perfunctory romance story with a protective social inferior (Channing Tatum as half-man, half-dog Caine Wise) free of charge.
To connect the narrative strands that move this story along, the directors somehow strike a perfectly horrific balance between aggressive exposition and explaining absolutely nothing. Dialogue unfurls in thick chunks of idioglossia filled with words that no human can understand but are presented as conversational, words that roll over Jupiter’s glazed eyes and helplessly slack mouth like a silent fart. Ancillary characters offer aphorisms that only perplex, like Sean Bean (as Caine’s mentor) defending his own genetic cross-breeding by glorying in the loyalty of bees and sincerely arguing “Bees don’t lie.” That’s a simple sentence, but it encapsulates the baffling nature of every line in the movie, which either makes up so many words that you have no way to parse the importance of anything, or employs actual subjects and verbs in a game of exquisite corpse that leaves thoughts unconnected and too quickly forgotten to even bother jotting down.
Speech competes with action to see which can be the most chaotic. The Wachowskis made great physical demands of the actors by stressing real stunts over total fakery. But what does it matter that it took six months for Kunis and Tatum to film a sequence where they are flung all around a CG Chicago as aliens tear the city to pieces to kill them if the end result buries their wire antics under endless explosions and millions of moving parts? Even when nothing is blowing up, the frame is repulsively over-crowded and oversaturated. The film was famously delayed for nearly a year to allow more time for special effects, and all of that time appears to have gone into making sure that every last person and object is colored orange or teal. The uniformity of the color timing renders distinctions between objects irrelevant, and even Kunis looks like she consulted with John Boehner on her tan.
It’s impossible not to feel bad for Kunis and the other actors trapped in this nightmarish orgy of sparks and ominous stares. One of the Wachowskis’ more honorable traits is their steadfast endorsement of women as capable, self-directed presences in their movies, but Jupiter is largely a bystander to her own story, forced to wait in peril for Caine to come rescue her. That leaves Kunis adrift in a $200 million movie ostensibly focused on her, strangling her wit and reducing any self-actualiation to verbal displays of confidence better suited to a post-grad coming-of-age movie that a hero’s quest. Eddie Redmayne plays the film’s chief antagonist so stiffly he appears to have been dropped in starch, and he speaks in what can only be termed a Voldemort whisper. Tatum acquits himself best in a dead-end part, but whatever sympathy he generates comes from his constant looks off-screen, which give the impression that he either couldn’t be bothered to learn his bullshit lines, or that the crew had to hold up his paycheck just behind the camera to keep him motivated.
The Wachowskis are no stranger to folly, but they usually match their inconsistencies and outright failures with incredible ambition. The cod philosophy of The Matrix may have aged poorly, but its selective quotations of Baudrillard, Descartes et al. gave the action film an offbeat flavor. Meanwhile, the far less accomplished sequels may have proudly stripped away whatever semblance of intelligence the first had, but they also committed so deeply to the siblings’ love of animé that they at least have a claim to being unlike anything else in Western blockbuster cinema. Cloud Atlas attempted to map out an emotion-based editing schema without simply copying Terrence Malick, and if it failed, the film’s approach to fluid identity clearly took on added importance as put forward by, in part, a transgender filmmaker. But Jupiter Ascending has nothing under its inane surface apart from a vague portentousness untethered to any real stakes. In that sense, it’s the dour cousin of the siblings’ greatest film, Speed Racer, a simple drama giddily wrapped in visual convolution and infused with the filmmakers’ amazement that anyone pays them to do this shit. One empathizes.
