Have you ever asked a five-year-old to tell you a story? Because if you see Jupiter Ascending, and I truly hope that you do, you are essentially asking a super-creative five-year-old to tell you a story. What if a werewolf who’s also an angel and, like, a space warrior had to fight Lord Voldemort and Dorian Gray for the love of Cinderella? Well, add in some fabulous eyeliner and a suspicious amount of crystal, and you’ve got Jupiter Ascending.
This movie is for sci-fi fans who enjoy their class critique and rickety world building to be well-cushioned in loud, fun, explody action sequences. Did you like Pacific Rim? You’ll probably like this movie. Did you feel that The Fifth Element was, at times, almost too restrained? You’ll definitely like this movie. Do you think Karl Marx had some swell ideas? You’ll like this movie. Do you want to see a big Hollywood movie that’s all about the evils of anti-aging schemes? You’ll looooove this movie.
So, about the plot. We don’t really need one of those, do we? There’s a Chosen One, a Fallen Hero, a couple of morally-ambiguous bounty hunters, a decadent triumvirate who are battling each other for control of the earth, an explanation of what happened to the dinosaurs… but none of it really matters. Here, I’ll try to summarize anyway:
Belam, Tuitus, and Kalique—three siblings of the House of Abrasax—are locked in a power struggle. Ostensibly, it’s the struggle to control different planets across the galaxy (including our Earth) but honestly they’re fighting over supplies of cosmic Youth Dew. Eddie Redmayne plays Belam while channeling Gary Oldman playing Christopher Lee playing Voldemort, and he whispers his lines and flutters his fingers in the air to pass death sentences. I want to marry the shit out of you, Eddie Redmayne. Douglas Booth plays Titus, the younger brother and requisite deviant wastrel, and Tuppence Middleton plays Kalique as a slightly defanged Margaery Tyrell. The three have wonderful portentous conversations that go nowhere, and I really really really want them to have their own Christmas special.
The actually important part of the film is the exploration of class. Our Cinderella, Mila Kunis, is an illegal immigrant who works as a housecleaner along with her mother and aunt, who fled Russia for Chicago. Her name is Jupiter Jones—Jupiter because her dead father was an astronomer (and seemingly her aunt is into astrology although that’s never really dealt with), and Jones because she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s Russian. She hatches a scheme with her cousin Vladie to harvest her eggs so the two of them can each buy the thing they want most: for Vladie, a giant flatscreen for videogaming, and for Jupiter, a telescope for dead-father-related-purposes.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the Abasax siblings are after her genetic code (kinda) and the Earth is actually just an alien stock farm (sort of) and she might actually be intergalactic royalty (in a way). Like I said, none of this particularly matters. What matters is that Jupiter goes off on an adventure with werewolf/angel/space-cop Channing Tatum, and what really matters is that Channing Tatum is playing Charlie Hunnam, and that he needs to wear eyeliner at all times. Did I mention that his character is named Caine Wise? Also? Sean Bean is a fucking bee farmer. And there’s a PG-13 space orgy. And fluent Russian is thrown around casually. And this is a film that thanks Swarovski Crystal in its closing credits.

This film is essentially all your favorite sci-fi movies smashed together, playing at warp speed, and I’ve never personally done angel dust but I feel that also might make a good reference point. There are bits of Soylent Green, Pacific Rim, Brazil, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Matrix, The Avengers, Labyrinth, Dune, probably a splash of Zardoz, all mushed together into a bright blue and orange exploding Koosh ball of a movie.
The film does actually have a couple of big ideas, and three serious points.
Serious Point 1: As usual, the working-class, queer-friendly, Wachowskis want to kick capitalism in the nards, and do so quite skillfully. Jupiter’s life as a housekeeper sucks. It isn’t just that she has to scrub toilets and make beds—the real problem is that the rich people she works for view her as a thing that is there to be used. During one of the key scenes in the film, her rich employer asks her if she’s ever been in love. This invasive question isn’t an awkward attempt at intimacy, though; the woman thinks that the rich-single-guy-under-thirty that she’s currently got hooked might be about to propose to her, and she needs a sounding board. Should she say yes? Should she try to get him to wait, while still hanging onto him as a future investment? Of course she’s asking this while she runs around her giant bedroom in her underwear, not minding that Jupiter is in the room because it doesn’t matter if you’re naked in front of the help. She just needs to figure out which McQueen to wear to dinner. This is a snapshot of Jupiter’s daily life, and it tells certain people everything they need to know about this movie.
Serious Point 2: The one commodity that truly matters is time. Its price is above gold, above jewels, even above cosmic Youth Dew. One of the recurring images in the film is Jupiter’s morning routine: every day her mother’s alarm goes off at 4:45am. This again, is vitally important. Jupiter, her mother, and her aunt are trying to squeeze every spare second of sleep that they can out of each night, but they also have to be up before 5:00 to start their housecleaning rounds. In much the same way that we get the sense of how much Earth time Matthew McConaughey is losing each time he gets stuck in Interstellar, here we have a sense of a poor immigrant family eking out every possible moment of rest before their slog of a day.
Serious Point 3:
This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh.
Jupiter has to learn to appreciate what she has, and see the beauty in her life, rather than reciting her mantra of “I hate my life” each day.
So it should be obvious that I liked the film quite a bit more than other reviewers, but there are flaws. There’s a long sequence with Sean Bean, Bee Farmer, that basically feels like it was lifted from the farm sequence in Looper mashed up with The Wicker Man, and goes on waaay too long. There is also at least one giant aerial chase too many, and a few too many moments when metal platforms collapse out from under key characters. (Mila Kunis’ arms should snap off in the first ten minutes of this film, but if that’s the sort of thing that’s going to bother you, this is not your movie.) We also get introduced to roughly eight billion characters in the first few minutes of the movie, but since most of them don’t matter in the long run, the problem sorts itself out.
This is also a story of a Cinderella who doesn’t want to be a princess. Normally in these movies the dudes are heroic and the women are beautiful and good, and get rescued. Even in The Matrix, Neo had to save Trinity. Jupiter is beautiful and good, but for large stretches of this film, she’s her own damn hero. She’s willing to make tough choices for the good of the many, because she believes that outweighs the needs of the few, no matter how special the few may be.

One of my problems with The Matrix was that it seemed to buy into revolution hinging on one person, special and chosen, to kick off the change and lead people into battle. Here the special person isn’t really chosen, she’s randomly generated, and she doesn’t lead a revolution. She protects her home, then goes back to work rather than being dazzled by the promise of being a space princess. I’ve already seen a few reviewers fault Jupiter for being too passive as a character, but I don’t think that’s the point. She’s more like Sansa—a young woman, with no real political training, who is suddenly expected to do strategic battle with three royal siblings who have all been fighting each other for millennia. Literally, millennia. Of course she’s dragged from location to location, and of course she’s confused. The part that matters is the choice she makes when she’s finally totally alone, with no back up, no one to help her or tell her what her best course of action is, and she’s presented with a choice that is at best morally grey.
So I’ll end here? If you like crazy movies, weird sci-fi, original storytelling, class-conscious twists on archetypes, you should go. This movie’s getting slaughtered, which is frustrating since it’s an original, overstuffed space opera. We need more movies like this one! It’s the only thing that will fight off the horror of more Transformers movies.
Leah Schnelbach would love to be a be-winged werewolf, but she’d settle for Channing Tatum’s eyeliner skillz. Follow her on Twitter!
So, does Sean Bean die? Please tell me he does.
Weirdly, that was also the first question a friend of mine asked when I mentioned Sean Bean was in it. Or perhaps not so weirdly. :)
And I was like, “If I told you that, it would be a spoiler. And don’t ask me whether he betrays the party, either.”
Congratulations. You’ve accomplished what all the negative reviews haven’t and convinced me to not go see the movie.
Saw this at a free preview. Thank god I didn’t pay to see this piece of crap. Closer to Flash Gordon than any of the movies you cited. I did like Pacific Rim. This makes Fifth Element look like Citizen Kane. And Milas Kunis can’t act.
Thank you for this. Honestly. I was going to go see the movie no matter what anybody said, because space operas are my favorite, and now I know that I will love it more than I dared hope.
I loved this movie unabashedly. It was ridiculous and gorgeous and had me thinking about where it could go as a sequel, all the interesting issues that come from people being able to play such long games of politics…
Thanks, Tor, for having a positive review! I hadn’t realized my thinking was that out of the ordinary…
“Do you think Karl Marx had some swell ideas? You’ll like this movie.”
Well, I’m out. I’ll save my hard-earned capitalist money for something else, thank you.
Immediately shared this everywhere. I’m not in the States right now, so I didn’t know how the movie was doing. I am honestly shocked at the poor opening. So much for all of the defenses of Transformers like “oh people don’t care about that America Fuck Yeah! stuff they just like the explosions”. I loved the huge space architecture and the cherry sundae wedding and the Silver-Surfer-as-rollerblader action scenes. But man, reptoids just can’t catch a break, can they?
“high concept”
Is that a codeword for “crappy movie?”
This movie is a mess. The Wachowskis basically stole $175 million.
On Twitter I described Jupiter Ascending as what you’d get if Dune and Star Wars got drunk and their love child was left on the porch of a nice couple who were really into Shadowrun and Traveller.
Oh, and baby had mitochondial DNA from Cordwainer Smith’s “Instrumentality of Mankind” series.
It’s flawed, but I thought it was great fun. Baroque decadent space empire staffed by animal hybrids and run by vampire capitalists? Hell yeah!
There’s no chance at all of a sequel, but I’d love to see a follow-up graphic novel in which Jupiter and Caine and some Aegis agents pull apart that corrupt system.
“Do you think Karl Marx had some swell ideas?” So there’s state-sponsored mass murder?
I went in expecting to hate it.
But it was fun – over the top, comic book FUN. Overacting with a purpose. Great visuals.
Destined to become a cult classic.
I’m in the same boat with @3 and others – I was about to give this movie a chance, but after reading this, I think maybe not.
Marx had swell ideas? Yeesh. Illegal immigrants? I’m sure the movie does plenty to give this a fair portrayal *cough* And I guess we should feel so super terrible about people having to do work for a living, and waking up before 5? OMG how does one live???
My brain just kind of BSODs when people complain about things like that, so I might spare myself for paying for the experience.
Did you feel that The Fifth Element was, at times, almost too restrained? You’ll definitely like this movie. Do you think Karl Marx had some swell ideas? You’ll like this movie.
You had me at Fifth Element, but Marx is a very welcome bonus. I wish we had more movies with a more tolerant viewpoint of Marx’s studies. That’s what drew me to both Matrix and V for Vendetta: due respect for the working class.
@11 Well, kind of, yes.
So Jupiters employers are so evil and heartless they ask her for relationship advice? That is really sticking it to the capitalist system…
@@.-@
Closer to Flash Gordon?
Sold.
(Whaaat, I have a soft spot for cheesy trash that doesn’t take itself too seriously)
This movie was delightful, despite dropping plot threads like loose change. (Don’t worry about the seven bazillion characters you’re introduced to! If they’re important, you’ll get reminded again of who they are the next time they show up. If they’re not, they just won’t show up again.) Visually garish in the best possible way, with action sequences I could actually track, and in love with its own silly high concepts. Werewolf ex-con space marine in flying rollerskates? Yes please.
And don’t forget the bureaucratic comedy sequence! Which sort of felt like it belonged in a different movie, but was absolutely delightful all the same. (Poor, poor Advocate Bob. That android needs a hug.)
I saw it in IMAX, and I’ll be back to see it again later this week.
@18: It sort of did belong in a different movie. A different movie named Brazil. With a cameo by Terry Gilliam (the fellow who puts the seal on her arm) just to drive the point home.
Man, half you commenters… lack of a sense of humor, especially for such ridiculous SF fun PHI 101 be-excellent-to-each-other popcorn fare, is grounds for being ground. Into Youth Dew.
I hated Pacific Rim, by the way. And now you’ve destroyed my enthusiasm for seeing Jupiter Ascending. Thanks.
3. Nick31
13. elvensnow
21. Robotics101
Yes, yes and yes. This just destroyed what little interest I had. I once invented a word for things like this – Contrarious Sequitur – an argument so atrocious that you come to the opposite conclusion. ( I mean, from the original post, not your posts!)
Also, I wanted to enjoy Pacific Rim, I really did, but it was a hopeless, incoherent, plot-hole filled mess that even giant mecha could not fix. Transformers likewise.
I can’t say enough bad things about this movie. Everyone saying this is a fun movie is on my shit-list for promoting sloppy sci-fi (I’m exaggerating but, seriously, y’all are suspect now.) I’m fine with fun movies full of cool ideas. That’s why I like Guardians of the Galaxy and The Fifth Element. But Jupiter Ascending was so focused on showing us neat things and being clever in bits and pieces that it forgot to tell a proper story. It had an unfocused narrative that bounced from idea to idea almost at random, but it was also emotionally detatched to the point that I didn’t feel anything for the characters in the movie because I honestly believe the Wachowskis didn’t feel anything for them. The people they showed us were just vehicles to get to cool effects shots and nifty bits of visual design. Say all you will about this movie being fun. I didn’t have any. This was sloppy, lazy, unacceptable storytelling.
I loved it. How decadent are these space humans that they have freaking giant chandeliers in the spaceship hangar bays? And I was half-expecting to see a Vogon in the intergalactic bureaucracy scenes.
And is it just me, or did Intergalactic Adjutant Bob sounded a lot like Oswald Cobblepot from “Gotham”?
I think the movie was good brainless fun, but I cannot help but disagree with some parts of the review.
I don’t think Jupiter did anything, which was very disappointing for me. She spent the entire time being saved, being dressed like a Barbie and falling for traps. Not exactly the strong female I want to see in movies…
And her family was too stereotypical for my taste (and their Russian was horrible for the most part, by the way).
The movie was beautiful and fun, but I don’t think they did a very good job shipping their ideas.
Went on Sunday morning with my wife (children were next screen watching Penguins of Madagascar) . Did not expect much , but found it tries to offer something out of the norm (which let’s face it is an overcrowded market) so enjoyed it.
So, is this like Flash Gordon or not? Because if it is, I’m going to watch it.
I saw this movie without reading any of the reviews….I prefer it that way. It’s a throwback to Flash Gordon & Buck Rodgers. Earth Human gets thrown into an alien adventure. The difference is that Jupiter Ascending makes you have to think to follow the plot. If you like a “They killed my loved one now I want revenge” style plot that can be explained in the films first 5 minutes then this movie will leave you baffled because you have to watch the whole movie to understand the plot. So I understand that in this era of twitting while you watch there are many that don’t get it. This movie is for those who prefer Stargate & Dune over The Avengers & Divergent.
Haven’t seen Jupiter Ascending yet, might see it next week just for the visuals and to see how much over-the-top it goes (otherwise, expectations are toned way, way down).
This — in the review — struck me, though:
“She’s more like Sansa—a young woman, with no real political training, who is suddenly expected to do strategic battle with three royal siblings who have all been fighting each other for millennia. Literally, millennia.”
It’s basically what happened to Yeine Darr in N.K. Jemisin’s THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS (and Yeine Darr wasn’t passive at all: inevitably made wrong decisions, but a protag through and through, with a deep background).
Now I’m imagining a movie with Jupiter Ascending’s — supposedly — stunning visuals based on THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS, which also stays true to the novel’s complex racial issues and politics.
It would be utterly awesome…
I saw a screening, it was not as fun as some of the movies name-checked in the essay or the comments.
The Fifth Element bears rewatching (I know people who have never seen the entire movie but can quote whole swatches of it from repeatedly catching huge chunks, at different times, out of order – of course, on cable television. FE has some dumb ideas and absurd plot points/elements but it does cohere into one story; the background for the character that presumably the OP believes is Channing Tatum’s, is far more clear and understandable.
This film would have benefited from some editing, some of the early scenes don’t go anywhere – for example, the female sibling. Once her part of the movie is over, her character has no role, not even a prospective role. The villainy is to cartoonish in the worse sense of the word, and it really needed to be paired down to one main villain with partners working for him or some such that would provide more logic. Failing that, if it were more fun as a ride, it would have been enjoyable.
I don’t feel like I wasted two hours of my life, but I am glad I didn’t pay $18 to see this in 3D. I would recommend folks catch it in a second run theater.
23% on Rotten Tomatoes (though audiences did rate it higher)
Consensus on RT: “Pleasing to the eye but narratively befuddled, Jupiter Ascending delivers another visually thrilling misfire from the Wachowskis.“
If there is one Original Sin the Wachowskis have committed (back with Matrix: Reloaded) that continues to plague Hollywood blockbusters to this day, it’s effects-driven action sequences that go on so long they lose all tension and excitement. This movie has those in spades. Surprisingly for the Wachowskis though, they’re also a visual mess.
Had this film cut down every action sequence by half, cleaned them up to be visually coherent, and spent that extra time on more worldbuilding or fun character moments, I’d consider this a new classic. But as it is, I’m shelving it with Oblivion, After Earth, and a lot of other recent original SF films: gorgeous art design, interesting premise, but otherwise forgettable.
Honestly, trying to sell this movie to people on the grounds it contains any meaningful social commentary is… misleading at best. Any serious point this film has to make about class or youth or immigration is completely superficial and quite possibly accidental. People who think Karl Marx had some swell ideas will be as baffled by this movie as the rest of us. It’s 100% pure crack with some fun performances and pretty visuals, so if you like that kind of thing, you might like it. That’s about it.
Having seen some poor reviews my expectations were set low so I was reasonably pleasantly surprised, despite being aware there are all sorts of problems with the film.
As the alien society (for the elite, anyway) portrayed in the world is essentially post-scarcity (apart from all-important Time for living in), some of the production design reminded me of what an Iain Banks Culture novel might look like filmed. However, the Gilliam-Brazil segment seemed right out of place; Mila Kunis having to queue with hundreds of other dweebs seeking redress from the Victorian bureaucracy made her whole grand title and the notional power of the siblings look like a minor local parish issue.
One “socio-political” reference I think I noticed: the Youth Dew stuff giving immortality to the elite required the juice of 100 harvested humans: presumably a “we are the 99%” reference, though the arithmetic doesn’t precisely add up. Another one I quite liked is the notion that genuine human lives on subordinate planets are so worthless they are genocidally harvested for their juices with no compunction, but for a rich man to have enough trustworthy people come to his wedding he has to crowd-populate it with so many simulated people that the quantity generated is an energy signal to his enemies approaching the ship!
I thought Tuppence Middleton as the female sibling was fabulous and promising; @fds is right that her bit doesn’t go anywhere plotwise and she simply disappears, but rather than edit her out she should have had some more effective agency and payoffy plotlining.
The action sequences are all too long and cartoony and CGI-y and all the rest, a fault with many other films including Lord of the Rings. Millions of space warhammers, several alien ships flown by naked ratmen – none of them gave much threat, just some pretty fireworks that palled after a bit. I recently saw low-budget Ex_Machina and there is one single punch there that is more visceral, more violent, better set up, more believable and with more serious consequences than most of the mayhem in Jupiter Ascending.
The final rescue in JA is almost a carbon copy of the first one: aerial, large fall, speed-skater hoverboots, clamber into a spaceship – just that one is in Chicago and the other is on Jupiter.
Anyway. I enjoyed it, but it could have been much better. I see some people have said this film might damage Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar chances, though I don’t see why. He played the part he took on as ddirected, presumably, and besides, the Oscar is for a performance in a specific film, not for a general year (though who knows how people are influenced to vote for other people, of course).
This movie was so bad, for the first time ever I had to leave movie theater half an hour before the end because I couldn’t bear wasting my time on it anymore. And, as you know, time is the most valuable commodity.
I don’t even care that it’s unoriginal or whatever. I love me a good space opera and I rewatched The Fifth Element countless times. The only good thing Jupiter has is the pretty picture. Everything else – acting, plot, characters, attempts at humor, worldbuilding’ – it was done really badly. Oh, and the only thing that Mexican-looking family was lacking from its “genuinely Russian feel” was a balalaika and maybe a bear in the corner.
I feel really uncomfortable that the same Wachowskis who created my beloved Matrix and Cloud Atlas are also responsible for this glittering piece of crap.
Spot on review.
Half human half animal underclass-Ballad of Lost C’Mell
tattooed revenger and aristocratic love – Stars My Destination
Collapse of galactic empire because of genetic anomaly – Foundation and Empire
Critique of Capitalism-Space Merchants
This is as close to a 50s sf movie as we are likely to get.
@@@@@ # 35 Radda – That’s the best detail observation about the movie I have thus far noticed! It appears the Wachowskis try to tell us that time is – objectively – the most valuable commodity, yet the entire movie feels like a waste of aforementioned, valuable commodity (not to imagine the manhours that went into its production). This is an irony of cosmic proportions. I’m still trying to come to terms with this flick. Maybe Andy is the driving force behind Revolutions, Speed Racer and Jupiter Ascending, while Lana has been the mastermind behind Reloaded, V for Vendetta and Cloud Atlas. It’s still not entirely clear to me how the two split up their workloads and responsibilities.
Space-capitalism doesn’t work!!! Thank you Jupiter Ascending for informing the masses! And I loooooved the rest of the film (Channing Tatum as roller-blading-wolf-angel, Kunis scrubbing toilets, Terry Gilliam’s cameo, Eddie Redmayne as 10’000-year-old psychopath)!
I’m baffled by this movie. How can something so visually stunning and so full of action be so boring?