Sci-fi boldly goes nowhere
The Wachowskis were once at the cutting edge of cinema sci-fi, with The Matrix still to be surpassed in both its provocative ideas about the nature of reality in a digital age, its cool, futuristic aesthetic and stunning CGI-enhanced action.
With their latest mega-budget wannabe blockbuster, Jupiter Ascending, they have reverted to the same appallingly plotted, nausea-inducing empty spectacle that is being cranked out by the rest of CGI-fixated Hollywood.
Indeed, with Jupiter Ascending they’ve even taken to ripping off Star Wars — not the lively early episodes but the turgid Phantom Menace, with so much tedious talk about taxation, legal structures and the Commonwealth I half expected Jar Jar Binks or even Joe Joe Hockey to turn up.
Admittedly, Jupiter Ascending has a half- decent idea, with Mila Kunis playing a Russian-born American cleaning lady named Jupiter Jones who, she learns early on in the movie, shares the DNA of a queen from the other side of the galaxy.
When the three children of the long-dead monarch discover their mother is still living on Jupiter, and that she can claim their vast tracts of land, they each send emissaries to bring her to them, with Channing Tatum’s chivalrous half-human, half-wolf hunter Caine Wise leading the way.
And there is an interesting mythology with echoes of both Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in which modern-day men and women are descended from an elite clan of humans in a faraway galaxy who discovered a way of extending their lives by feeding off other humans whom they plant in other worlds (it is the source of the family’s great wealth).
It has potential for some juicy Game of Thrones/House of Hancock familial feuding. But Andy and Lana Wachowski (who also wrote the script) forgo richly involving family drama for deadening, ham-fisted scenes in which actors vomit out the backstory in great unappetising globs.
The thrown-together storyline is matched by the visuals which have a maddening anything-goes quality. Rather than creating a chic aesthetic as they did in The Matrix the siblings have created an overstuffed sci-fi cliche op-shop, with every image recalling something you’ve seen many times before.
Clearly the siblings were shooting for a bit of Star Wars-style intergalactic fun with a spunky young woman who normally scrubs toilets for a living suddenly finding herself the centre of an intergalactic power struggle.
But in Kunis’ Jupiter and Tatum’s Caine they have two of the least interesting sci-fi adventure heroes in recent memory.
Jupiter almost has nothing to do as she is pulled hither and thither by the late queen’s warring children and is unfazed about being yanked into a comic-book world (“Holy cow!” is the best she can muster), while there’s nothing wolf-ish about Tatum’s bland action-man character apart from his pointed ears (with his trim blonde beard he looks like Will Ferrell’s outrageous fashionista Mugatu in Zoolander).
At least they get out with their dignity intact which is more than can be said for the preening, strained performance by Eddie Redmayne as Balem, the most tormented of the late queen’s grasping offspring.
For some reason Redmayne adopts a weirdly strangulated high-pitched voice, as if he is doing Marlon Brando in The Godfather at the same time as having his testicles squeezed by a production assistant. You wish someone had given him Stephen Hawking’s speech synthesiser.
If Redmayne wins the Academy Award for best actor on Sunday night’s Oscars — he is the frontrunner after winning the Screen Actor’s Guild Award among others — it could make for the most interesting double in movie history.
Has anyone ever won an Oscar and a Razzie in the same year?
Jupiter Ascending opens tomorrow.
