Jupiter Ascending

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  • Jupiter Ascending

    Saw this tonight with low expectations, but was surprised and liked it. Ultimately I don't think most people will go see this in the movies though because the trailer looks underwhelming IMO...but the concept was pretty cool and the VFX were great. I liked the story too.

    Any thoughts?
    One must be fearless and tenacious when pursuing their dreams. If you don't, regret will be your reward.

    The Fiction Story Room

  • #2
    Re: Jupiter Ascending

    It was God awful. There was no heart, no emotion, and the actors looked bored to even be on screen. It's as if they knew the film would turn out shi**y. It was so full of corn and cliché. Like the Wachowski's had a checklist. I can't remember the last time a protag did so little. There was a good story in there somewhere, but the script was just terrible.

    What saddens me the most is due to the Wachowski's complete unawareness of what a good film is, studios will look at its well-deserved shi**y BO returns and turn down even more original ideas.

    All we have left is Chris Nolan and fellow Canadian James Cameron.

    (in sarcastic Bundy voice) Thanks Wachowski's for fuc*in up any future hopes of an originality revival.
    I'm never wrong. Reality is just stubborn.

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    • #3
      Re: Jupiter Ascending

      Yeah definitely had a bunch of cliches....I liked the overall concept they were going for though I guess it wasn't executed the right way. I guess I had even lower expectations then what it actually was....the vfx looked good, but damn I had no idea the budget was that high.
      One must be fearless and tenacious when pursuing their dreams. If you don't, regret will be your reward.

      The Fiction Story Room

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Jupiter Ascending

        Originally posted by Juno Styles View Post
        Saw this tonight with low expectations, but was surprised and liked it. Ultimately I don't think most people will go see this in the movies though because the trailer looks underwhelming IMO...but the concept was pretty cool and the VFX were great. I liked the story too.

        Any thoughts?
        I found it to be an incredibly frustrating experience on any number of levels.

        Story-wise, I thought that it failed to gel, right from the beginning, (Spoilers ahead).

        So she's got a Russian Mom and an American Dad who's always looking at the sky through a telescope -- and when Mom is pregnant with her wants her to be named Jupiter (and later on we discover that she's actually part of a Galaxy-spanning royal family that, strangely enough, is currently based in a huge city/space ship inside the giant red spot of Jupiter).

        And before she's born, a group of Russian gangsters breaks into their room somewhere in Russia, tries to kill both of them, kills the Dad and runs off.

        Who are they? Do they anything to do with the rest of the movie? Is the Dad related to the galaxy-spanning Royal Family (thus accounting for him giving his unborn daughter the name Jupiter?).

        Nope. He's just some guy, her mom is just some girl. The gangsters were just some gangsters. It's just a pure roll of the genetic dice that she happens to have the *absolutely* *precisely* *identical* genetic code of the mother of the three current rulers of this vast world-seeding galactic dynasty

        Go figure.

        So getting past that, there's a real feeling across the whole script of not quite having been finished.

        Loose ends that aren't tied up. We meet Sean Bean's daughter at one point, and she's very specifically introduced -- then she goes off to get groceries -- and apart from one brief reference, we never see or hear from her again.

        A very big plot element is that Channing Tatum (also Sean Bean) were demoted from the Imperial Guard -- of whatever (and de-winged -- apparently these guys normally have wings grafted on -- very useful) because he let his doggy genes get out of control and he bit an "ascended" -- presumably one of the royals, and Sean Bean took the blame because he was Channing's boss.

        But unless I was nodding off at some crucial moment, then never explained who the Royal was that he bit.

        There's an extended sequence when Mila Kunis is "ascended" -- when she officially becomes one of the royals which is so completely out of the tone of the rest of the movie it's as if the Wachowski's both got the flu and they brought in Terry Gilliam to shoot for a couple weeks and spliced those scenes into the movie without looking at them.

        The movie seems to duplicate certain key dramatic moment and not to good effect. Mila Kunis falling from a great height and Channing Tatum flying in and rescuing her. It's perfectly fine, but we don't need to see it twice.

        Mila Kunis about to agree to something horrible with one of the Royals -- and it's interrupted by having Channing Tatum aboard some little space ship come blasting through the walls of the castle/fortress/spaceship and rescue her.

        Once? That's fine. Twice? Not so good.

        The more movies like this I see, the more convinced I am that there are really only a handful of directors who know how to shoot action scenes well.

        And unfortunately, the Wachowski's aren't among them. (Neither, by the way, is Michael Bay).

        There are just certain fundamental things that you have to do in order for an action scene to work. You need to know who is who and where things and people are in relation to other things and other people.

        If you watch the original Star Wars, one of the things that might pass you by about all of the space ships is this.

        They're all white or light grey. You put them against the black of space and you can see them.

        Even in the scene in Empire Strikes back, where you had white Imperial Walkers and white Snow Speeders, they were lit to maximize their visibility.

        In Jupiter Ascending we had an extended night battle scene above a city with space ships that are virtually black. That, along with the frenetic shooting and cutting, makes it extremely hard to know what the hell is going on.

        Go the finale -- There's Jupiter (the girl) and her family that's been kidnapped by the Chief Bad Guy, and the Chief Bad Guy, and there's Channing Tatum -- and since he just busted through the wall of this giant fortress space ship inside Jupiter's (the planet's) giant red spot, the whole things is now going boom bang crash.

        This scene goes on for a long time and during most of it, you have absolutely no idea where anyone is in relation to anyone else. Most especially, you have no idea where Jupiter's family is in relation to her or to Channing Tatum. More to the point, she has no idea that a rescue ship is following Channing Tatum into the midst of this exploding, collapsing fiery hell -- so there is no clear course of action for her to follow. No place for her to go. Nothing for her to do.

        It doesn't work as an action scene and it doesn't work dramatically.

        Which leads to another moment that's repeated twice, in this case one that I found particularly annoying.

        This is one of those classic "Hollywood development" good guy notions. It's what made the original Han Solo, who was perfectly happy to shoot Greedo first in the original version of Star Wars, suddenly have to assume this phony "Hollywood good-guy" persona and wait for the digitally altered Greedo to shoot first before he returns fire.

        We've established that these Galactic Royals literally grow and harvest entire worlds of human beings -- kill them by the countless billion and reduce them down to this sort of life-force liquid that they use to extend their own lives so that they are millennia old, but at an appalling cost.

        They are literally the worst mass-murderers in all galactic human history.

        And we have not one -- but two instances where Jupiter is given the chance to cash two of these f**kers out -- but gee-golly-gosh -- because they don't happen to be armed at that exact precise moment, she can't do it.

        First, she's got this slimy guy who blasted Channing Tatum out an air lock and blackmailed her into marrying her (that's the first time that Channing Tatum comes blasting through the side of the ship).

        And he has a gun to his head. You want me to kill him?

        Very simple answer. Yes. Absolutely. Kill him.

        Second time around, she's got the chief bad guy, the absolutely most villainous slimy villain imaginable, the one who killed his own mom (Jupiter's genetic duplicate). Who stares at her and says -- she couldn't kill me. Neither can you. You don't have it in you.

        So what does she do? She shoots him in the leg. Really? Hmm, I wonder if, just maybe, he's going to show up again.

        And what happens then? Is her amazingly stupid earlier failure to kill this sucker going to sink in and cause her to kick this guy off the top of a collapsing balcony?

        Oh no. Because, were we to do that, we might credit her with some microscopic grain of common sense.

        No. Much better to simply wait helplessly while the screenwriter obliges and dumps him off without any assistance from the main character.

        They literally weren't even willing to drag out the tired tried-and-true trope of letting the bad guy, Greedo-like, draw a weapon first so that Jupiter could, in good conscience, blast the bad guy's freaking head off and claim self-defense!

        Finally, the whole movie resolves in a way that I found to be deeply unsatisfying.

        You've got these world-slaughtering Galactic Royals -- and Jupiter gets "ascended" -- so she's one of the royals, but only in a limited sort of way. The Earth belongs to her, but apparently that's all.

        So at the end of the movie, she goes back home. She's still queen of the earth, sort of, but she's opted to go back to living her old life, cleaning toilets by day and messing around with dog warrior boy friend (now with his very unconvincing wings restored).

        Wow, really happy ending -- except for the countless thousands of other human-inhabited worlds throughout the galaxy who's populations are still being slaughtered and reduced down to human-juice for the two surviving royals who are still running the Galaxy.

        All well, I guess Jupiter has more important things to --

        More important? Like what? More important than saving hundreds of billions of people? Just what would happen if she'd done in those other two royals? Wouldn't that somehow have left her as the only actual Ascended? The only Royal left?

        The movie kept circling around this notion that the Mom, whose genes she possesses, had had a crisis of conscience and wanted to end the harvesting of human beings.

        So -- wouldn't it sort have made sense for to her pursue that objective rather than go back to scrubbing toilets?

        Again, you just have to wonder whether anybody ever read this script and asked these questions or whether it reaches a point with certain filmmakers that studios and creative executives just say -- no, these guys are so brilliant they must know what they're doing.

        Or else they give them notes, they raise questions and the Wachowskis just don't bother and nobody's prepared to press the point because they've made so much money and everybody just crossing their fingers and hoping that the problems will somehow get fixed over the course of production.

        Well, sometimes they do (a reshoot, after all, is just a really, really expensive way to do a rewrite) -- and sometimes they don't.

        NMS

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        • #5
          Re: Jupiter Ascending

          Hahaha, your breakdown of that movie is brilliant. I saw the film opening night just for kicks - it was stupid, but I had enough fun laughing at it to enjoy it (same thing I did with the latest Hobbit movie).

          Biggest thing I took away was that her whole "royal family" is into incest, but apparently she's more into bestiality, so they all had to fight.

          Anthony D'Alessandro over at Deadline seems to believe nobody at WB was really running the show after Robinov got the boot just prior to production. Thing is, the Wachowskis added up to $80mil in reshoots and overages. Somebody had to approve that.

          I'm guessing the Wachowskis are going to have a hard time coming back from this. Twenty bucks says they go into television for a bit.

          Comment


          • #6
            Re: Jupiter Ascending

            With my writer's hat on, of course, it has a lot of issues.

            Despite this though, I still had a good time seeing it in IMAX. At the very least, it looks great and it had some interesting production design. It was strangely somehow more than the sum of it's parts.

            I guess I still prefer the watching something like this to say watching a reboot of Spiderman or Terminator or whatever is the franchise of the week. The Wachowski's are a bit different and a little bit odd but that's what I like about em, because there has to be more to modern cinema than just DC or Marvel Comic book films and rehashing 80s and 90s blockbusters. I don't care that they messed it up, at least they tried.

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            • #7
              Re: Jupiter Ascending

              I'm guessing the Wachowskis are going to have a hard time coming back from this. Twenty bucks says they go into television for a bit.
              Well, that was fast!

              Wachowskis' TV series 'Sense8′ will show on Netflix, and Netflix CEO Sarandos says it's "Better Than Their Films":

              http://deadline.com/2015/02/in-wake-...e8-1201370191/



              Late Night Writer

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              • #8
                Re: Jupiter Ascending

                Originally posted by LateNightWriter View Post
                Well, that was fast!

                Wachowskis' TV series 'Sense8′ will show on Netflix, and Netflix CEO Sarandos says it's "Better Than Their Films":

                http://deadline.com/2015/02/in-wake-...e8-1201370191/



                Late Night Writer
                I wasn't aware of that development, but it apparently came two days ago, so my precognitive powers have yet to be proven. Damn.

                Honestly, the W's probably saw JA's poor performance coming like everyone else did, and had the sense to skip straight to the next step.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Re: Jupiter Ascending

                  Originally posted by nmstevens View Post
                  I found it to be an incredibly frustrating experience on any number of levels.
                  Great essay NMS. You really nailed its flaws. This is just another example of the pitfalls of having early success. Lucas, Wachowski, Shayamalan. Their first films were huge, historic and ground-breaking. So they started believing WHATEVER further ideas they had MUST be golden as well.

                  It's obvious from Jupiter that the Wachowskis simply CANNOT COMPREHEND what a good story with an active protagonist is.
                  I'm never wrong. Reality is just stubborn.

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                  • #10
                    Re: Jupiter Ascending

                    Well, they got it right one time with BOUND. I liked THE MATRIX, but BOUND is still their best.

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                    • #11
                      Re: Jupiter Ascending

                      Originally posted by Eric Boellner View Post
                      I wasn't aware of that development, but it apparently came two days ago, so my precognitive powers have yet to be proven. Damn.

                      Honestly, the W's probably saw JA's poor performance coming like everyone else did, and had the sense to skip straight to the next step.
                      No, Sense8 has been in development a while. I have a draft of the pilot from Nov. 2013.

                      After reading it, I have to question the whole "better than their films" statement. I couldn't understand a lick of what was going on.

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                      • #12
                        Re: Jupiter Ascending

                        Originally posted by docgonzo View Post
                        No, Sense8 has been in development a while. I have a draft of the pilot from Nov. 2013.

                        After reading it, I have to question the whole "better than their films" statement. I couldn't understand a lick of what was going on.
                        Yeah sorry, I posted that without reading the article yet - I just read something about the W's doing a Netflix show, thought it was a new development.

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