BEFORE: Getting very close to the start of a new month now, and this holiday weekend is the unofficial start of summer, though it won't cosmologically be summer for another three weeks. I went to RibFeston Saturday, that was summer-y, and yesterday my wife and I went out to the Brazilian churrascaria in Queens, so it's been a very meat-centric weekend. But the Brazilian restaurant trip was re-scheduled from Easter weekend, that's where we like to go eat on Good Friday, because fewer people are there eating meat - theoretically, anyway. But this year I was working on Good Friday, so the meal wasn't possible. I'll give out a preview of June tomorrow, but May's been good and bad, what with both of us getting COVID and me missing two weeks of work as a result, so money's a little tight right now. Thankfully I bought my ticket to RibFest months ago, and at half price. Now I just have to economize a bit, until I can get paid for June's shifts, and also the freelance consulting work I'm doing for a couple of other filmmakers I know. More about that later, perhaps.
James D'Arcy carries over from "Into the Storm".
THE PLOT: A young woman discovers her destiny as an heiress of intergalactic nobility and must fight to protect the inhabitants of Earth from an ancient and destructive industry.
AFTER: Well, I avoided this sci-fi movie for a number of years, it came out in 2015, and then it was on Netflix for a while, but I just couldn't find a place for it in my schedule, so it left that service at some point. I couldn't find it on Hulu or Tubi or whatever, so I was forced to rent it from YouTube today. Just $3.99, but I'm supposed to be trying to save money, and not spend anything extra on movies, besides the cable bill and our Hulu, Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions. Well, paying $3.99 is easier than finding another film that would link "Into the Storm" to tomorrow's film, the only other connection I see would take two films, and I'm already full up between now and Father's Day, so "Jupiter Ascending" it is.
This was directed by the Wachowskis, and all I know about them comes from "The Matrix" and "Cloud Atlas" - so maybe that's why this film feels a little bit like a cross between "The Matrix" and "Cloud Atlas". It's got some similar themes to "The Matrix", like the unlikely hero who doesn't really see himself/herself AS a hero, or feels unworthy somehow, having greatness and expectations thrust upon them. Also, that hero is thrown into another world unlike the one that they're familiar with, and there are all sorts of new rules that they don't understand. "Cloud Atlas" was eight kinds of crazy - I may be due for a re-watch of that film at some point - and so is this one, there are all kinds of weird aliens and spaceships and future tech (like in some parts of "Cloud Atlas"). Oh, and Earth turns out to be a big harvesting locations for an advanced civilization, and humans are the equivalent of livestock. That's very "Matrix"-like, isn't it? Or did I misunderstand "The Matrix"?
The human hero here is a woman named Jupiter Jones (not sure if there's any significance that she shares her name with a character from the "Three Investigators" teen novels) whose father died before she was born, and who lives with her mother and aunt and works for her family's house-cleaning service in Chicago. She hates her daily life, so it's probably a relief for her when she's targeted for an alien abduction during an egg-cell donation, and then rescued from the "keepers" by an intergalactic soldier who is somehow half wolf. After a flight around the Chicago skyline in an alien spacecraft that keeps falling apart or getting shot down, this soldier, Caine Wise, saves them both with his anti-grav boots. They drive to another soldier/agent, who lives in a house that's like half bee-hive, and for some reason, Jupiter can control the bees.
Yeah, this is a weird one, but we're just getting started. Jupiter is somehow the "reincarnation" of an intergalactic matriarch/business-woman who "owned" Earth - she doesn't have that woman's soul or her memories, but genetically she is exactly the same as this deceased woman, who lived to be 90,000 years old, and then statistically speaking, somehow it's possible for Jupiter to have the same genetic make-up of her, but even if that WERE possible, which it isn't, that wouldn't make Jupiter that woman - although legally according to galactic bureaucrats, they are the same, despite having none of the same relatives, experiences or memories.
Jupiter then has to deal with the members of the Abrasax family, all descended from the woman who was genetically identical to her, who owned the Earth and was preparing to harvest its lifeforms at some point when the planet became too overpopulated to continue. (Uh oh...). Her descendants are a daughter named Kalique, and two sons, Titus and Balem. But first Jupiter has to go through a lengthy amount of paperwork on the capital planet, Ores, to prove her genetic make-up and claim her inheritance, which is Earth. Then the Abrasax kids try to take the planet away from her, Titus charms her and proposes marriage - but as a form of a business deal, he just wants to kill her after the ceremony and then inherit the planet. Whew, thank God, it looked for a second there like he wanted to have sex with his own mother. Caine, once again, arrives at the last second and rescues Jupiter from making a terrible mistake by marrying Titus.
The other brother, Balem, takes a different approach, he sends a giant lizard-like alien to kidnap Jupiter's whole family, and take them to, umm, Jupiter. The planet, not the person. Balem offers Jupiter, the person, a deal where she can have her family back safely if she abdicates her title, which means he'll inherit the Earth instead of her. But then she realizes that if she signs away ownership, Balem will start the harvest, and then there won't be an Earth to go back to. Not one with other people, anyway, and repopulating the planet would be a lot of work, so no deal. Fine, then Balem tries to kill her, which kind of makes her regret her choice - he wants to inherit the planet one way or the other. And yet AGAIN, it's Caine who has to struggle to beat the clock and arrive just in time to save Jupiter from a fate worse than marriage, namely death.
Caine's arrival at the refinery (inside the "Great Red Spot" of Jupiter, nice touch) broke something, and the whole factory starts collapsing, so it's a very tense end battle as everyone's fighting everyone else, and trying to win before the giant building/city crumbles and they all get destroyed by the super-planetary storm. Thankfully all of Jupiter's family members gets portaled out and then zapped, "Men in Black"-style, so they don't remember being kidnapped by lizard aliens.
I don't know, this one is WAY out in left field - I'm a big sci-fi fan, sure, but this weird universe of spaceships that aren't all in one piece and vials full of human life-essences is way beyond the familiar (to me) universes of "Star Wars" and "Star Trek". And still, with talking lizards and people who are half-deer or half-bee walking around, somehow Eddie Redmayne's character is the weirdest of all, despite being completely human. He delivers all of his lines as if he's mid-yawn, like he's always on the verge of falling asleep or something - it's supposed to be some kind of affect that tells us he's evil, but from an acting standpoint, it doesn't work, it's just odd.
Nice cameo from Terry Gilliam, though - he plays a bureaucratic minister deep within the paperwork-fueled capital planet, and this can only be a huge visual reference to the film "Brazil", which Gilliam directed. So this film was once going to be linked to "An Accidental Studio", that documentary about the Monty Python movies and the studio financed by George Harrison, but that doc has so many famous people in it, from Sean Connery to Sean Penn to Maggie Smith, I'm sure I can find a place for it somewhere, if not this Movie Year, then definitely next. Even if it just connects "Mona Lisa" and "Withnail and I", that still serves a purpose.
Also starring Mila Kunis (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), Channing Tatum (last seen in "Free Guy"), Sean Bean (last seen in "North Country"), Eddie Redmayne (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Douglas Booth (last seen in "Mary Shelley"), Tuppence Middleton (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Nikki Amuka-Bird (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Christina Cole (last seen in "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"), Nicholas A. Newman, Ramon Tikaram, Ariyon Bakare (last seen in "Life" (2017)), Maria Doyle Kennedy (last seen in "Sing Street"), Frog Stone, David Ajala, Bae Doona (last seen in "Cloud Atlas"), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (last seen in "The Whole Truth"), Edward Hogg, Tim Pigott-Smith (last seen in "Victoria & Abdul"), Jeremy Swift (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Kick Gurry, Larissa Kouznetsova (last seen in "MI-5"), Demetri Theodorou, Lieve Carchon, Oleg Nasobin, Emily Renée, Vanessa Kirby (last seen in "Genius"), Spencer Wilding (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Andy Ahrens, Charlotte Beaumont, Bryony Hannah, Samuel Barnett (last seen in "Bright Star"), Claire Benedict, Peter Yapp, John Locke (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Grant Stimpson, Sarah Crowden (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Terry Gilliam (last heard in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Rupert Frazer, Simon Dutton, Tim Connolly, Tamela D'Amico, Hazel D'Jan, Thomas Gaitsch, Julie Graham, Eric Ian (last seen in "Empire State"), Charlotte Rickard, Clem So.
RATING: 4 out of 10 warhammers
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