Once again, the Wachowskis have emerged to present another lofty production with a weighty subtext and enough bright lights and whistles to make Michael Bay feel unworthy. The Matrix directors have managed to cultivate a career on making films that have lots of promise, philosophical depth and huge spectacle but whose quality is often questionable. In fact, The Matrix is the only directorial effort of theirs that courts near-universal praise, with the rest, such as the disappointing Matrix sequels, Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas all walking a line between being outright bad, dreadfully camp and a touch muddled. With Jupiter Ascending, Andy and Lana have taken on what might be their most ambitious film since Mr. Anderson’s war against the machines, with a whopping 175 million dollar budget having been plunged into the special effects – the post-production even requiring the film be taken out of blockbuster season in 2014, and instead released at the less-than-optimum month of February in 2015. It’s unfortunate, then, that the 
problems the film has were never going to be fixed with fine-tuning the green screen.
Taking a less than subtle nod from Neo and co., Jupiter Ascending stars Mila Kunis as a regular young woman living a hum-drum life as a cleaning lady, until she finds out she is the ‘chosen one’ and the heir to the planet Earth and finds herself in the midst of an inter-galactic sibling squabble over planetary ownership. Rescued from alien assassination by part-animal, part-man hybrid Caine (Channing Tatum), the film follows Mila’s Jupiter Jones as she’s rattled from location to location in an attempt to salvage her life and return to normality. This main arc is something of an oddity – absolutely bathed in cliché with the strong protector turned love interest as the protected realizes their potential, there’s still the basic ideal that Jupiter’s character is taking the standard male power fantasy and turning it on its head by making the core narrative about Jupiter rejecting the life thrust upon her, and sticking to that decision. The problem isn’t the idea, it’s the execution. Mila and Channing struggle to find chemistry amongst the myriad of woefully boring lines and forced romance. Aside from when she’s being thrown around in well-organized action scenes, there’s no urgency in her safe-keeping as her character’s plight remains completely under-developed.
But Jupiter Ascending isn’t really about Jupiter, or the action scenes, it’s about the universe that the Wachowskis have built for themselves to play in. In the same way that the Matrix trilogy was hinged on human introversion, Jupiter Ascending has its sights set firmly outward. Tying human existence into an allegorical ouroboros featuring medieval property ownership and a vampiric lust for immortality, the real stars of the film shine in the feature’s antagonists, the three children of the House of Abrasax. Led by Eddie Redmayne’s whispery Balem, the eldest and most maniacal, these three add flavor to the mundane arc of our protagonists, with each one almost having their own color scheme amongst the glittery expanse of the beautiful worlds created. Filled out by Titus (Douglas Booth), who plays the younger brother, filled with confident swagger and deceit, and Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), whose grace keeps a strong middle-ground amongst the chaos, every scene with one of more of these couldn’t last long enough with the variety of alien races and architecture to be found in the background. It’s what’s happening at the periphery of the story, with the bloated mythology 
and slightly skewed creature design that beckons the most interest, it’s just a shame the camera never seems to look directly at any of it for long enough.
There’s a great film somewhere to be found in the robotic plot-lines and extensive world-building within the pages of Jupiter Ascending, and somewhere off in the distance glimpses of that great film can be seen and occasionally almost embraced. Unfortunately it remains buried and choked out under the weight of too much forced baggage with the two lead characters and a resilient reliance on their story. This is the closest to past greatness that the Wachowskis have come since The Matrix, and the most damning evidence that that wasn’t a one-off, but they continue to merely teeter on that brilliance and give as much bad as they do good.
Well played action and enchanting special effects let down by a sour plot and poor scripting. 5/10
