Film Review: Jupiter Ascending (2015)

A young cleaning woman hates her life, until one day she finds out she is heir to a great intergalactic fortune, but that some of her new relatives want her dead.

Genre: Sci Fi

Starring: Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne

Director: Andy and Lana Wachowski

Many critics didn’t really like this film, saying it feels so much like it’s trying to create a world, rather than create emotion and relationships. It is true that exposition plays a big part in this film, but… OK, let me put it to you this way: I like intellectual films, I do. But I go to the movies to watch huge spectacle, costumes, a huge explosion and maybe a little romance.

And this film is just that. It does what it says on the label. So what if the girl has to get rescued three times, it’s Mila Kunis! She’s great! And she has these great costumes and she’s all awkward cos she has a crush on Channing Tatum, who plays this rogue mercenary who is part wolf. So what if it’s a bit silly, I kind of like that.

I think maybe people were thinking “oh it’s those siblings that did the Matrix?” and got their expectations up that it was going to be the Matrix of this decade. It’s not. With some changes, maybe it could have been really dark and gritty and satisfied that crowd, and yeah, I would have gone to see that too. But it’s more like a comic book, it’s colourful. (Nothing more comic book than Eddie Redmayne’s ridiculous performance) It’s having fun, and when I saw it, I had fun too.

See It If: You like comic book movies, Channing Tatum, or science fiction.