I'm really enjoying reading JUPITER ASCENDING reviews

general topics
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I don’t plan on seeing the movie in a theater. I’ve got 3 small kids, and the only movies I see in the theater are from Disney, and I’m the only one awake at the end, crying silently into my wallet.

<img src=“//cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/boingboing/original/3X/c/4/c4a888e6d993ae9bd3a6db482a8a284b0ed1af41.gif” width=“500” height=“240” alt=“in THIS house we don’t hit our baby brothers with monster trucks”" title=“in THIS house we don’t hit our baby brothers with monster trucks”>

Anyway.

I saw the Matrix degrade slowly and beautifully, but did not see Speed Racer, nor Cloud Atlas.

I’ve been enjoying the JA reviews.

it's amazing what you can build with DUPLO these days
it's amazing what you can build with DUPLO these days636×258 1.97 MB

Anybody else?

 

‘Jupiter Ascending’ Flops: Why the Wachowskis’ Failure Is Bad for Movies (Variety)

How the Wachowskis became George Lucas (EW)

I enjoyed Jupiter Ascending way more than The Phantom Menace, mainly because I enjoy hilariously bad movies much more than numbing mediocrities. And Jupiter Ascending is hilarious, and bad. You can feel the Wachowskis trying to come up with a visual idea half as compelling as bullet time—and what they land on is Channing Tatum’s sky-boots, which don’t so much allow him to “fly” as roller-skate through the air. Close to two hundred million dollars, and the Wachowskis came up with Space Xanadu.

Jupiter Ascending Is The Worst Movie Ever Go See It Immediately (The Mary Sue)

The plot is this: the Wachowskis were given an extraordinary amount of money to make whatever the hell they wanted, and what they wanted to make is exactly what we all, secretly, deep down, want to make: the big-screen adaptation of that Stargate fanfic you wrote when you were fourteen that really went off the rails and began to inhabit its own universe, complete with original characters, wolf-men, and bees. That’s Jupiter Ascending.

[…]

I’ll also say that the film was, as has been mentioned in endless reviews, preposterously derivative. Everything reminded me of something else; the structure reminded me of Dune, the space-gates reminded me of Cowboy Bebop, that one ship was lifted directly from 2001, that rat dude was just Peter Pettigrew, and the cyberpunk mercenaries literally stepped out of Trinity’s Fashion School. But I couldn’t tell if they were all supposed to be intentional homages, or if it was just straight-up laziness on the part of the Wachowskis – and that’s not a good feeling.

Jupiter Ascending: it’s time for an intervention
 (The Verge, thanks @daneel)

The outrageous, opulent design had me thinking quite a bit about Alejandro Jodorowsky, actually. Last year the wonderful documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune detailed the filmmaker’s failed attempt to bring the novel Dune to the big screen in the 1970s. He assembled a group of incredibly talented artists and visualists to articulate his vision, and while the movie itself was never made, many of those design fragments seeped out into the world, seeding films like Alien and Star Wars. The unspoken truth at the heart of the documentary, however, was that Jodorowsky’s vision for Dune was genuinely batshit crazy, and even if it had been made we would have gotten a visually stunning film that made zero sense. [emphasis added]

Jupiter Ascending’s Spaceship Designs Are Even Cooler Than You Knew (IO9)

this is pretty much what our house looks like with toddlers redecorating
this is pretty much what our house looks like with toddlers redecorating2000×1017 336 KB

I read another one last week that I wish I could find back; it basically gave a plot “summary” that sounded like something a narrative-generator churned out when the processor overheated.

where's Nicolas Cage?
where's Nicolas Cage?500×200 958 KB

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I don’t plan on seeing the film at all. I guess I might when it’s free at the point of viewing somewhere. Thought it looked dreadful from the first trailer, the cast is underwhelming to say the least, the plot sounds like genderswapped warmed-up Matrix, there’s a hammy posh Brit doing the stereotypical scenery chewing bad-guy schtick (at least it isn’t Cucumbersnatch), and the film has been delayed and buried (always a sign of quality).

Bound was a nice little film, The Matrix was great, shame they never made any sequels. I thought Speed Racer looked dreadful, but I heard good things, so I checked it out last year, didn’t see the appeal, it was another awful mess. Cloud Atlas was overblown (haven’t read the book) and some of the casting was…uncomfortable. Not sure how much they had to do with V for Vendetta.

I enjoyed this review title though:

Jupiter Ascending: it’s time for an intervention

ETA: I like that one of your reviews says you should go see it because it’s original, and another says that every element of it is derivative of other films. Is that what counts for originality these days? The Matrix wasn’t original either, but it was a well made film.

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The Codex Seriphanus is original, Finnegan’s Wake; everything else is derivative.

Originality is over-rated, a 20th-century totemic practice that will eventually, hopefully, fall out of style. Originality is interesting, but hardly ever fun.

Star Wars and Indiana Jones were highly derivative – and they wore it on their sleeves.

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You take that back!!! Cumbersquee makes all things better!!!

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I think a film that is aware of the tropes it is awash in and the films it is copying from, and embraces that can be good. See every Tarantino film ever. Most sequels are just lazy cash-ins, though. If you have a story worth telling, tell it.

Knowing that Indy is an homage to Sat morning serials doesn’t mean I think that an Indy film with Chris Pratt because he was quite funny in GotG is a good idea. 10 years ago they’d have given the job to Brendan Fraser after the Mummy films. Equally, I don’t expect to bother with the Ghostbusters reboot.

Exhibit #1: Another Spider-Man reboot coming.

But Hollywood is a business. No point expecting something interesting to come from it very often. Better to have low expectations and be pleasantly surprised occasionally.

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They should make a film where everyone is played by him and Fassbender. Seems to be what they’re aiming for anyway.

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Okay, that’s kind of sort of true… But people will get tired of them soon enough, I’m sure.

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As somebody who watches movies which range from the most unprofessional home made to the most rarified and meticulous, I am always quite skeptical when something which at least appears somewhat competent is lambasted as “worst thing evar!”. Especially when I see so much bile pooling up on the net before anybody has even seen it. The Wachowski’s own Matrix sequels are a great example - they might not be great, but they are still IMO better made and more interesting than most sci-fi action movies.

I think that there’s an unfortunate disconnect with people’s expectations of homogeneous big-budget spectacle and the subversive possibilities of idiosyncratic offerings. Which is precisely why I think avoiding working in the Hollywood system is the most prudent choice any film makers / videographers can make. People seem to have a love/hate Stockholm syndrome relationship with Hollywood. As I try to remind people, there are hundreds of movies made every year, and most of them do not come from big studios. Yet, when people decry the state of modern cinema these big studio works are precisely those they go to see, and then complain about.

Jupiter Ascending appears to me to be in the lineage of schlocky big-budget sci-fi action such as Flash Gordon, Lifeforce, Dune, Chronicles of Riddick, and many others. Audiences balk “There’s no way I can take this seriously!” when the movies obviously do not take themselves very seriously in the first place. Years later people come around and realize that the movie was actually - with all it’s flaws - fairly well-crafted, stylish, and aesthetically immersive. There’s obviously too much social context being shared here if people can’t decide for themselves whether or not the experience is “supposed to be” fun. It’s unsophisticated and bad filmmaking to require a nudge and wink to know that people are allowed to enjoy it. Action movies have often been cheesy as hell so I wonder if casual audiences assume that sci-fi action is somehow dealing with more sophisticated concepts. If that were the case they would probably be making straight sci-fi. IMO “supposed to be” is the death of critique. Instead of looking to be spoon-fed conceptual/emotional/situational context for works, people need to interpret them based upon their own contexts, and their own experiences. But then it wouldn’t be “pop” anymore.

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Sure. But why do people fall for it time and again? I wish people would break the cycle of Hollywood abuse and look elsewhere. It happened to some extent with independent music. Hardly anybody seems to feel that their choices in music are constrained to what big music labels have to offer.

I read that at first as Fassbinder! Now that I would have gone to see!

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I don’t know anything about it, but after seeing the following, I really want to see it now:

"Jupiter Ascending" Idea Meeting Re-Enactment Andy Wachowski: What about rollerblades? Lana Wachowski: You mean SPACE rollerblades! Andy Wachowski: What about magic? Lana Wachowski: You mean SPACE magic! Andy Wachowski: What about a treatise against capitalism? Lana Wachowski: You mean a treatise against SPACE capitalism! Andy Wachowski: What about genetically engineered bees? Lana Wachowski: YOU MEAN SPACE BEES! Andy Wachowski: Don't ridiculous. Just normal bees. Lana Wachowski: Can they at least detect SPACE princesses? Andy Wachowski: BRILLIANT!
Edit: Via
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i’ve read “finnegans wake” 3 times. it too is derivative . . .mainly of james joyce’s drunken bouts of talking to himself and internal monlogue over his lifespan, but still derivative.

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I’ll reuse my Twitter review:

So I saw Jupiter Ascending and it was like Dune and Star Wars got drunk and had a love child and the baby was left on the doorstep of a lovely couple that was really into Traveller and Shadowrun and that baby grew up to be a movie and I mean this in the best possible way.

And then add:

Oh. The mitochondial DNA of that love child might have come from
Cordwainer Smith’s “The Instrumentality of Mankind” setting. Or that might be a Recurrence.

Glorious, baroque, non-stop big-canvas space opera. Wolf-human hybrids, flying dinosaur guys, vampire-capitalist (<-- more or less literally) noble families, robot family troops . . . just glorious mindless slop.

This movie is more like a idiosyncratic movie adaptation of a beloved graphic novel than an original movie.

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Last time I went out to see a movie was Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive”. I thought it would be nice to see, but had trouble finding it playing anywhere. That day I found it playing at a cinema not far from me - their last showing of it was a matinee early that afternoon. I took a train out there and arrived at the cinema, where the film was not listed on the marquee. When I asked about they found out that it was playing, but nobody was aware of it because during the whole time it was showing there all of their signs for it listed as another room showing “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”. So they sold to me a ticket and directed me to the appropriate Captain America room. As I arrived, the room was empty. In the few minutes before the film started, three more people entered. One pair sat in the back, and one guy sat one row behind me, loudly whistling the song “Who wrote the book of love?”. Once the film started, everybody left except for me, as it appears they were expecting Captain America also.

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that reminds me of a bit of the original dialogue from the radio series of “hitchhiker’s guide” regarding the location of the plans for the bypass–“It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”

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Because one more can’t hurt.

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