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Jupiter Ascending

Starring: Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Sean Bean, and Eddie Redmayne
Directed by: Andy and Lana Wachowski
Screenplay by: Andy and Lana Wachowski

     From the creators of your favorite mind blowing trilogy that you can't stop referencing whenever you can, The Matrix, comes a brand new movie, you might just totally forget about.
     Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is a cleaning lady just trying to make a living.  When Caine Wise (Channing Tatum) comes along, everything changes.  She is thrust into a whole new world with a whole new understanding of who she really is.
     The earth is part of an industry, led by the Abrasax family (from an entirely different planet of humans), which harvests worlds with intelligent life so humans can live essentially forever.  Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne) is the heir to Earth, which means he can harvest it whenever he wants to.  Caine is aware of what the Abrasax family wants to do so it is up to him to stop them.  In order to do that, he must show Jupiter this new and overwhelming life and have her claim her royalty to Earth (although reluctantly), which means that harvesting the Earth can be averted.
      The plot is very underdeveloped, and the world is not developed enough.  It's not bad sci-fi, it's just sci-fi done badly.  Jupiter wants nothing to do with Caine Wise and any of this stuff that she is thrown into.  It is as if she could simply go home and the movie would go on without her.  It's hard to take her seriously throughout the movie as well.  She just blindly accepts what is happening around her and doesn't ask too many questions.  Normally in a movie like this, the protagonist asks tons of questions about what is happening around him or her, but not in Jupiter Ascending.  This forces the viewer to simply go along with it too.  As a result, as the movie goes on, it goes from bad to worse.
      As you may know, Eddie Redmayne just won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in The Theory of Everything.  He is a far more talented actor than he demonstrates in this film, and while he is fine in his role, the film is in my mind a waste of his talent.  The same goes for Mila Kunis.  Jupiter Ascending is not the kind of movie you go to see for great acting, rather you see it for the good fun the movie is going to be.  Mila Kunis and Eddie Redmayne are not the best choices for this movie even though they still put on decent performances.
      If you've seen earlier films of the Wachowskis', you might know that movies like The Matrix are extremely awesome.  Jupiter Ascending sadly falls way short of being even close to awesome.  This is a film that had so much potential yet fell way short of what it could have been.  It's one of those movies that is so bad it's actually hilarious.
     I give Jupiter Ascending a D.

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