Jupiter Ascending. Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
You know what I love about the Wachowskis? Whatever they are doing, they just go for it. A lot of their recent films have been shot through with this very weird universalism, which led to a scene in the Netflix series Sense 8 featuring a global astral projection orgy. Weird? Heck eah it was. But you have to respect their willingness to just dive straight into the deep-end.
This fearlessness (underwritten, it must be pointed out, by the cultural and financial cachet of the Matrix) has defined pretty much all of their work. Speed Racer was a gorgeous piece of crap, but no one can ever say that movie didn’t hold back. Cloud Atlas, which I personally think is a great movie, was a really ambitious epic spanning six different time periods with interweaving narratives. Sense 8 was, well, as I described above – it pretty much begins and ends with the words “psychic orgy.” The important thing, I think, to keep in mind is that when you have such enormous ambitions sometimes you are going to fail.
Jupiter Ascending was, pretty much without doubt a failure. This movie is ridiculous, and not in a good way. Channing Tatum plays a half-dog man who zips around on rocket-powered roller skates for much of the movie. Eddie Redmayne is…. I mean, it’s hard to describe this performance but it basically comes down to him either whispering very softly or shouting like a maniac. Coming off some big (and undeserved in my opinion) prestige film success, he really jumped into it and it is probably one of cinema’s great and terrible over-actings of recent memory.
Now, there are beautiful images in this film. A space ship rises up through the dust rings of Saturn at one point and it is gorgeous to look at. There is also an interesting little bit about bureaucracy in a universe-spanning empire that I thought was pretty great. But for the most part this movie is absolutely terrible, so much so that it definitely nears the territory where it becomes pretty entertaining because of how bad it is.
And that is a fair criticism. It swung for the fences, and it missed. But it is important that films that are willing to go for it, to swing for the fences and to tackle big ideas that might backfire and make them look stupid, it is important films like those get made. I support the impossibly big vision of the Wachowskis, because if it weren’t for people like them then we would always just get safe Marvel fluff. So yes, let’s absolutely and enthusiastically support their wild and crazy movie ideas about space operas where Earth is just part of a galactic biological farm system for the uber-rich because even if sometimes the idea doesn’t translate we need these kinds of big spectacular failures or else we will just end up with the same safe boring boilerplate movies all the time.
