Friday 6 February 2015

Merely the first ten idiotic things that occurred to me about Jupiter Ascending

Jupiter Ascending is shit, there are lots of reasons why, here are ten. Oh you wanted a better introduction? Well I wanted a better film. Hey ho.

1. Mila Kunis plays a cleaner called Jupiter, who cleans toilets. It is impossible to accept that Jupiter has ever come within sniffing distance of a bottle of Cillit Bang; Mila Kunis and toilets go together like Denise Richards and nuclear physics.
Just an ordinary, staggeringly beautiful, ravishingly lit and made up toilet cleaner

2. Eddie Redmayne plays a character who, in early scenes, is set up as the film's antagonist. He is then more or less ignored for about eighty minutes while his brother and sister perform deeds of low-level dastardliness for reasons which are neither entirely clear nor remotely interesting. Also their scenes end so abruptly that I am suspicious that the script was ever finished. Also they all live on Naboo.
"Wait wait wait. Tell me again how you did the Stephen Hawking robot voice?"

3. Channing Tatum plays a creature whose DNA has been "spliced", and he is part human, part wolf. Sean Bean, similarly, is part human, part bee. I'm not even joking, although I did need the bee thing pointed out to me after the film because it's explained in about four words of dialogue through which I may have sighed too loudly to hear. The extent to which all this cabbage makes an impact on the story is that Tatum has pointy ears and growls once, while Bean lives in a house with lots of bees. He doesn't even have stripes or a sting in his bottom or anything. Oh no wait hang on his name is Stinger KILL ME

4. At one point it is explained that Tatum's character once bit out the throat of an "Entitled", of which Redmayne's character is one. Redmayne whispers and wheezes like Baron Greenback off of Danger Mouse and wears high-cut gowns which conceal his throat, suggesting that it is he who was on the receiving end of the Tatum choppers. However the incident is never referred to again, leading me to suspect that somebody forgot to write that page too.
"Minions! My golden platter of Strepsils! I have a motherfucker of a sore throat"

5. Channing Tatum performs an entire fight scene with his shirt off for no other reason than he is Channing Tatum.
It's because he has muscles all over his front

6. Jupiter Ascending features lots of alien creatures whose design has been so haphazardly thought out that they just look like humans with slightly altered features. One lady has ears like Dumbo, which is hilarious. She can't hear better or fly or anything, she just looks like fucking Dumbo. Also there is a pilot who resembles an actual elephant; he gets maybe three close ups, in each of which he makes a funny noise.
This guy is an absolute hoot

7. Obviously because this is a big-budget sci-fi there must be enormously OTT space battles in which it is impossible to understand what the fuck is going on. Why can nobody design simple spacecraft these days? Everything has to have a million flappy bits hanging off it or spikes sticking out everywhere or other pointless paraphernalia. All I ask is to know whether I'm looking at good guys or bad guys, instead of having my retinas eviscerated by billions of pixels exploding in my face in glorious 3D.
Fuck off.

8. The whole film is so quackingly silly that with an intelligent tweak it could have been a camp classic; this generation's Flash Gordon. Instead the Wachowskis play everything so straight that for a film which features Channing Tatum as a pointy-eared dog-man with a Mugatu beard who skates through space on hover boots, the tone remains resolutely, painfully humourless. I mean, would it hurt to have Tatum sniff Mila Kunis' anus when he first meets her? I don't think so.
"Oh cool, I was wondering where I left my lipstick WOAH JESUS"

9. Actually there is one scene in the middle of the film which knows it's meant to be funny: an odyssey through the labyrinth of some kind of space bureaucracy, in which Kunis is passed from one department to another with increasing frustration. The scene, which features a sly Terry Gilliam cameo, feels like it's fallen out of an early draft of The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy and doesn't quite know how it ended up in a space opera staged by children on cocaine.
You're right, Tel. You do deserve better.

10. At one point about two-thirds through I realised I hadn't laughed, smiled, frowned or indeed registered any emotion on my face since the film started. In order to prevent facial muscular atrophy I shouted obscenities at the screen but nobody could hear me over the sound of millions of dollars being flushed down the shitter.
Literally can not remember what this person does or why

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