Jupiter Ascending (Wachowski siblings US 2015) by Warner Bros (review)

The opening of Jupiter Ascending, like much of the film, operates like a fairy tale. A man and a woman meet, get pregnant and then are tragically torn from one another when the former is gunned down attempting to save his precious telescope from being stolen. The woman flees her home country of the Soviet Union, and in the middle of the ocean gives birth to the protagonist Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis). We are told via voiceover narration that she is born in the House of Leo, with Jupiter ascending to some amount. Astronomy and astrology, and science and mysticism, all bleed into one another within the world of the film.

The highlights of the Wachowski siblings' filmmaking career rest in their ability to distil complexity into an understandable form for a wide audience. The Matrix (Wachowski siblings US 1999) takes the cyberpunk literature of the 1980s and 1990s and combines it with messianism to tell a simple story of struggle under oppression. Speed Racer (Wachowski siblings US 2008) grounds the sprawling, nearly abstracted world of the classic anime of the same name within the reality of corporate espionage and globalisation. Cloud Atlas (Wachowski siblings US 2012) transforms a novel with disparate themes into a coherent, if challenging, set of metaphors, adapting the feel of the novel more than its exact content.

Of course, the realities of working in that mode in the public sphere of the contemporary worldwide-distributed sf film comes with the reality that a creator or creators' methods might not always land with the movie-going audience. Jupiter Ascending was met with middling reviews from publications such as The A.V. Club and Village Voice, but the vast majority of other outlets took a strong stance of excessive negativity toward the film. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers called the film an 'unholy mess', while Richard Roeper's Chicago Sun-Times named it an 'awesomely horrible hot mess'. The reviews for the film slam it for being too complex, for its overuse of computer-generated effects and for its supposedly weak performances, and this opinion has become the received wisdom in contemporary discourse around the film. When I told people I was writing this review of the film, they were surprised that it would be worthwhile or even wanted.

Jupiter Ascending refracts its topics of science and mysticism through a pan-galactic story about space capitalism. The plot of the film proceeds equally through both action scenes and moments of quiet revelation in which lies are exposed. After the opening of the film, we are introduced to the adult Jupiter Jones, an undocumented immigrant born between nations who is working as a house cleaner in Chicago. She lives with a large, extended family who do not have her best interests at heart, and she longs to possess a brass telescope of the same make that her father died for. As we are being introduced to Jones and her life, we encounter a parallel narrative centred on an intergalactic empire whose economy is (we have to presume) based on a genetic rejuvenation commodity known as RegeneX, or Nectar. The application of RegeneX to the human body will de-age that human, making them younger in appearance and allowing them to live for millennia. One character explains that when a civilisation has access to all of space, the only thing left is time. 'Time', she remarks, 'is the single most precious commodity in the universe'.

The prime movers of the parallel plot are the House of Abrasax, which is comprised of Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) and Titus (Douglas Booth). These three siblings are caught in a power rivalry in the wake of the death of their mother Seraphi Abrasax, whose most prized possession was a deed to the planet Earth. This deed is important because the ownership of planets allows the owner to 'harvest' those planets to create RegeneX. To harvest a planet means to cleanse that planet...