Fish and Cherries Productions

Jupiter Ascending was a movie so bad, it nearly broke me. Unlike Fifty Shades of Grey, I didn’t have a healthy cushion of alcohol to fall back on and as such I got the full force of a movie terrible enough to make me laugh and cry in the fetal position at the same time. The best you could say about the film is that it’s visually creative, but that’s about where the praise ends. We know next to nothing about the characters, save for a few where they have exposition dumps devoted to them, who all seem to struggle with one another for relevance in the story. Even the main villain switches in the middle of the story, apropos of nothing. The whole thing is incredibly bland storywise and has the distinct dishonor of being one of those rare movies that is both over-explained and yet criminally underdeveloped. Concepts are introduced, but are by no means established, leaving a lot of hanging scenes where you just have to wonder what the point was. Even if they’re leading up to a punchline, you can’t help but feel that the whole thing could have been left on the cutting room floor.

But the biggest crime of this movie is how it takes Eddie Redmayne and puts him in an absolutely thankless role. He won an Academy Award for playing Stephen Hawking, but here his performance alternates between a poor man’s Marlon Brando and a screeching rooster. It would be bad enough to leave it at that, but then there’s the gender politics that go belly-up in this supposedly women empowerment film. I said back in another Snippet that I don’t consider the Bechtel Test a show of real feminism and this film is living proof. Despite it passing the test, Jupiter constantly gets kidnapped and needs saving to move the plot forward. That really sums up the experience, as I feel like I was getting abducted from reality against my will and forced to watch this dross. If anyone likes this movie, I won’t hold it against them, but I personally want to bundle up all my memories of this film and fire them into a black hole.

The Theory of Everything is a very heartfelt movie about a serious subject: love and life with a truly crippling disease. I truly have to give props to Eddie Redmayne; I wasn’t a fan of him in Les Miserables, but here he is able to convey emotions very well, even when portraying Stephen Hawking in the disabled years of his life and working through very limited expressions. There are no villains, either. People make mistakes, but they’re very human mistakes. Without giving too much away, they’re the kind of mistakes that would make you question if you wouldn’t do the same in a similar situation.

With all that said, there is one part that makes me scratch my head a bit. Near the end, Steven Hawking (Spoiler alert: he doesn’t die in the movie for rather obvious reasons) has a momentary daydream where he gets up out of his chair, walks off his disability, and picks up a pen that someone dropped. I’m honestly baffled by what it’s supposed to mean. It’s possible that it was just him wishing that he could do the simple things like everybody else, but the scene was so overblown that I’m convinced that it had to mean something bigger. It’s a topic for discussion, at the very least. And that’s really what it all comes down to: showing that you don’t need Russell Crowe to make a movie about a beautiful mind.

And a few clever Doctor Who references don’t hurt either.