Jupiter Ascending

Now, I was forewarned. Everyone who had seen this film said it was bad. Really bad. But possible so bad it was enjoyable. I’d say it was indeed terrible enough to be enjoyable in parts, but mostly it sat in the middle of atrocious and mediocre, and thus was not even very fun. And oddly enough, it was when buildings were exploding and spaceships were bursting through planetstorms that the film was dullest.

To get the full disclosure and the name-dropping out of the way, I’ve actually been acquainted with two of the people in this film. I was in Oliver! with Eddie Redmayne – I may have mentioned that once or twice lately – but the film also had a very short cameo/featured extra part for my good schoolfriend Bryony.

And I’m sorry to them both, but I can’t say that there was much to admire here. Actually, Redmayne was clearly having a lot of fun in a very campy, hammy role quite unlike the ones that have been winning him acclaim lately. He’s obviously relishing putting on a silly voice and occasionally bursting into quite absurd fury every so often, but it’s not really a performance that can carry an otherwise drab film.

I’ll always have a certain amount of loyalty to the Wachowskis thanks to The Matrix and how superb it was when it came out. The Matrix was silly, I grant you, borrowed heavily from anime and of course only concluded with sequels not many people admire – but it had two things this film doesn’t. Firstly, cool. This film horribly lacks the cool factor. And secondly, the impression of a genuine menace: the machines of the Matrix and their agents are unoriginal but iconic.

The mistakes of this film are manifold. Its central character – Jupiter Jones – is both absurd and hard to like. Her empowerment story is just a step too far – toilet cleaner to princess of the universe. She also spends almost the entire film as a damsel in distress for Channing Tatum’s character Caine – genetically engineered so he can be semi-literally a lone wolf – to rescue. Their romance is horribly underdeveloped and rings false. And that Caine rushes to the rescue on horribly lame sci-fi flying rollerblades causes quite a bit of inner pain.

The plot is overwrought and overlong. In the sci-fi world of Jupiter Ascending, the Earth exists only as a breeding ground for humans. When it reaches a population the planet cannot sustain, a harvest will be ordered and everyone will be processed into an elixir of life that lets the aristocrats of the universe – who all have English accents, of course – live forever. However, if the exact genes of any aristocrat repeat themselves in any human born anywhere in the universe, they are considered a reincarnation and honoured – these are even factored into the wills of the extremely long-lived elites. And of course, Jupiter is one of these: the ‘recurrence’ of the head of the most powerful family of all. This makes her the true heir to a fortune that includes the planet Earth. Redmayne’s character, the eldest son of this matriarch, wants Jupiter dead, but his siblings have other plans for her, and thus she is passed between the three of them until violence can solve all her problems. And when she is put in a position of incredible power, does she try to shut down the system that so horrified her and dedicate her life to stopping the ridiculous amount of death she now has the influence to affect, where planet after planet is harvested? Nope, only Earth matters, apparently, and she doesn’t even think about the other similar planets that will still be harvested, even if one plant on Jupiter has been destroyed.

There were things I liked in the film. There’s a tribute to Terry Gilliam that is so blatant that they had to get Gilliam himself in for a brilliant cameo to ensure that everyone knew this was an homage rather than a rip-off. But it’s a wonderful little take on bureaucracy that sadly is far above the rest of the film. The absurdity of Caine busting in to stop a fake marriage at the last moment took the high-camp to enjoyable levels. The dynamic of the Russian immigrant family worked well as something peripheral. The costumes were of course wonderful, and the three bounty hunters who kind of represent ideas of ‘ethnic minority badass traits’ in the States admittedly bring some of the coolness that’s deeply lacking elsewhere. I also liked Sean Bean’s grizzled, fallen soldier character, even if he was very much underused. Plus of course the makeup, prosthetics, sets, effects and designs were superb. It was a good-looking film, even if some of the spaceships looked a little clunky.

But the whole thing feels half-baked despite being over-long. What happens to the other siblings in the end? How can Jupiter live knowing the industry is still going on, even if Earth is safe? Surely she’s still a huge target for assassination/ coercion into marriage/business deals? Is Caine able to hang around her as a bodyguard? What about Sean Bean’s daughter? Aren’t there people out for revenge after the head of the most powerful family in the universe is killed?

Limited fun, eye candy and some snatches of (other people’s) brilliance can’t stop this film being anything other than an absurd waste of money – and a very poor echo of the brilliance of The Matrix. 

Ex Machina

While I really liked Alex Garland’s books in school, when The Beach was all the rage, I always felt like he fancied himself a good bit cleverer than anything demonstrated in his writing. That wasn’t a problem in the straightforward, uninventive screenplay for 28 Days Later, with this foray into being writer and director, it was at the centre of why I didn’t like this film very much. It’s had excellent reviews so far – 94% ‘fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes – but it really says nothing new about A.I. paranoia and sadly remains predictable and ponderous to the end.

It’s a kind of open secret that one of Google’s aims are to create very advanced A.I. That seems to have inspired this story, in which a genius coder behind the world’s premier search engine has created an incredibly advanced robot named Ava. This coder is an enigmatic alcoholic named Nathan, played by Oscar Isaac – soon to appear as Apocalypse in the X-Men films – who for some reason very much reminded me of Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy. He owns a vast research facility and runs a competition to find someone within his company to take part in a kind of modified Turing test – the test being whether the person chosen can over the course of a week decide that Ava is conscious even though she is demonstrably a machine. The one chosen is the bland everyman Caleb, played by Domhnall Gleeson, son of Brendon and Bill Weasley in the Harry Potter films.

The plot thickens as Ava is able to turn the cameras off and talk to Caleb directly. She is clearly an incredibly advanced intelligence, and able to detect lies as well as warn Caleb not to trust Nathan. Nathan, it turns out, has used information harvested from all the world’s internet searches and facial scans from all the world’s webcam calls – and of course selected Caleb based on the information gleaned by that sort of invasion of privacy rather than based on his abilities or at random. Caleb inevitably gets a bit nutty when he starts developing feelings for Ava, discovers that there are a number of previous discarded prototypes and rather unconvincingly gets so paranoid he slices his own arm open to check he’s not another of Nathan’s machines.

Nathan has the most advanced technology in the world available but still uses keycards carried in the pocket to access restricted areas for some reason, which ends up crucial to the plot. While Nathan is drunk, Caleb sets Ava free in a classic cheesy scene of one person thinking they have the other in the palm of their hand but it being the opposite – and I won’t give away the ending, but this is after all Alex Garland.

There were some lovely acting moments, and the CG gives the impression that this is a glorious high-budget film instead of quite a small-scale production with a bare minimum of cast members. But overall this was a pretty soulless and self-important film that gets all its heavy moments from the overdone cliches of the genre. How do we know what intelligence is in another? When can a machine be called sapient? How do we truly know we ourselves are what we think we are? Can a man love a robot? Do androids dream of electric sheep? It’s really nothing very new or inventive, and nor is the plot able to elevate it.

Towards the end, the music is so heavy-handed and the full-frontal female nudity so gratuitous that the whole thing comes over as extremely juvenile. It feels like what a sixth-former would produce given $20 million, thinking himself so very profound. But I seem to be in the minority thinking this. This film lives or dies on whether it impresses. And for me, it fell well short of that.