Jupiter Jones scrubs other people’s toilets in Chicago. By the end of Jupiter Ascending, she owns the Earth. That is the promise the Wachowskis make in their 2015 space opera, and it is a promise the film never earns.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
A Cleaning Woman and a Telescope
Lana and Lilly Wachowski wrote and directed Jupiter Ascending, with Grant Hill producing alongside them. Mila Kunis plays Jupiter, a housekeeper who sells her egg cells to buy a telescope. Channing Tatum is Caine Wise, the interplanetary warrior who drops into her life and tells her that her destiny reaches past Earth.
The setup is not small. It is the whole universe.
The House of Abrasax
Human genetic material is the most precious commodity in this cosmos. Alien royal families seeded planets, Earth among them, to harvest the resulting organisms into a youth serum for elites elsewhere.
When the matriarch of the House of Abrasax dies, her children quarrel over the inheritance. Balem, played by Eddie Redmayne, takes the business empire. Kalique, played by Tuppence Middleton, takes the planet Cerise. Douglas Booth’s Titus burns his share on a lavish spaceship. None is named Sovereign. They are styled First, Second and Third Primary.
Three Heirs, One Inheritance
| Heir | Actor | Inheritance |
|---|---|---|
| Balem | Eddie Redmayne | The Abrasax business empire |
| Kalique | Tuppence Middleton | The planet Cerise |
| Titus | Douglas Booth | A lavish spaceship |
Titus sends Caine to bring Jupiter to him. Keepers try to kill her first. Caine fends them off, kills the squad, and hijacks one of their vehicles. The film treats this as a revelation. It plays as noise.
Sean Bean and the Supporting Fleet
Sean Bean plays Stinger Apini. Nikki Amuka-Bird plays Diomika Tsing. Maria Doyle Kennedy plays Aleksa, Jupiter’s mother, who named her daughter after Maximilian Jones’s favorite planet and moved the family from Saint Petersburg to Chicago.
Terry Gilliam cameos as the Seal and Signet Minister, the bureaucrat who confirms Jupiter’s title to Earth. The scene calls back to Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil.
The Matrix and Star Wars, Twice Over
Booth has described the film’s universe as a cross between The Matrix and Star Wars. Kunis named indulgence and consumerism as its themes. Both statements are accurate, and both are the problem. The film stacks two influences instead of building one world, and its critique of consumerism arrives dressed in the most expensive costume design Kym Barrett could supply.
What the Runtime Buys
Jupiter Ascending runs 127 minutes. It has Hugh Bateup’s production design, Dan Glass’s visual effects, John Gaeta’s visual effects design, Dane A. Davis’s sound work, Michael Giacchino’s score, John Toll’s cinematography and Alexander Berner’s editing. That is a murderers’ row of Wachowski collaborators, assembled since the Matrix films.
The craft is not the failure. The failure is that a cleaning woman inheriting the universe should feel like a joke told with a straight face, and this film never finds the joke.
What the Egg Cells Cost
The one idea Jupiter Ascending handles with any nerve is the egg donation. Jupiter walks into a clinic under her friend Katharine Dunlevy’s name, and the film quietly puts a price on her body before the universe does. That thread — a woman sold in pieces long before she is told she is royalty — is the movie the Wachowskis could have made.
They bury it under 127 minutes of inheritance law. Jupiter Ascending is a 4.0/10.
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