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.

After watching Cloud Atlas, I have come to two conclusions. The first is that this movie is incredible and the Wachowski’s best film to date. The second is that somehow, someway, this movie has changed me. The movie itself is a beautiful tale about how one drop in the ocean can create waves that can reach places that the drop could never have dreamed of and will probably never see. It may be an old lesson, but it’s one that will always ring true. The way that everything connects is absolutely astounding, which is amplified by the multiple-role casting across six different stories that are kept perfectly balanced. I can say without a doubt that I will be seeing this movie again and that it has earned a place as one of my all-time favorite movies.