Movie Review: ‘Jupiter Ascending’ – Space Camp

By Kyle Osborne

Note: This is not a review. It would be dishonest to say that I saw all of “Jupiter Ascending.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s the worst movie I’ve seen in recent memory, and if I were officially giving it a rating, I’d give Zero out of 4 Stars. But I’m not officially rating it.

I have never walked out of a movie in the almost 30 years I’ve been a critic/reporter because it is simply unethical. However, here is how much I loathed “Jupiter Ascending”:

The lady who was my date for the evening–I met her for the very first time less than half an hour before the movie started, so she was essentially a stranger, and I should have wanted to make a good impression–but during the movie, it was so boring and so crappy and I knew I couldn’t leave, so I just told the lady, apologetically to be sure, that I was just going to have to go to sleep for a while. My body quite literally was shutting down (I presume this is a survival mechanism, my body protecting itself from being exposed to the train wreck onscreen) and I hoped she would understand and not think me rude. She gave the go-ahead.

And so I slept, not nearly long enough, but I slept. The lady was very kind and understanding and, apparently, she was more philosophical about the whole thing. Her attitude seemed to be that “Bad movies happen to good people sometimes, and all you can do is lose consciousness.”

It’s not like the potential for something less than a disaster wasn’t there—Andy and Lana Wachowski are directors who swing for the fences, which one must admire. Their “Cloud Atlas” was big and bold and a fun movie, for its length. Their Matrix Trilogy claims a place in film history, without question. But those movies didn’t have Channing Tatum sporting elf ears and a bad beard.

Mila Kunis plays a Cinderella character whose trajectory is very, very much like Cinderella’s—only in the future and stuff. She cleans toilets (totally something Cinderella would have done if there had been that kind of plumbing in her day) and is good and sweet and…wait a second, she’s also the Queen of the Solar System/Universe/Whatever Grouping of Planets It Is?

Yep, she sure is. I think it was Channing Tatum, who whizzes through the air on Back To The Future-style jet-skates, who breaks this good and bad news to her. I think.

But it’s not going to be so easy to claim her real estate—that’s because Eddie Redmayne, in a performance that takes Camp to new depths, wants to keep the kingdom to himself. By the way, it’s quite possible that Redmayne will win the Oscar later this month for his brilliant portrayal of Stephen Hawking in ‘The Theory of Everything.” If he does, he should immediately give it back—right there during his acceptance speech, for the atrocity he commits in this film. Great actor, great singer, great guy, by all accounts. I’m sorry this has happened to him

Anyway, a LOT of noise ensues, some cool sets and backdrops, and a story that just isn’t interesting enough to put up with all the attendant waste products.

It gives me no pleasure to report this—people think critics love to pick on films, but we truly don’t. We root for movies to be good because we love them. We want to love them.

Sometimes a movie is so bad that it makes me want to stab myself in the neck with a pencil. “Jupiter Ascending” affected me in a totally different way—it didn’t inspire violence against myself, but it did make me lose the will keep my eyes and ears open. I think that’s almost worse.

I don’t know if I’ll ever see that lady again. But if I do, I’m pretty sure we won’t go to a movie.