JUPITER ASCENDING

Directors: The Wachowskis
Writers: The Wachowskis
Stars: Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean
Strength: Effects, action and story
Weakness: Script, confusing presentation
Runtime: 127 minutes
Rating: 2.5/5

Plot: Jupiter dreams of the stars but wakes up to the cold reality of a job cleaning other people's houses and an endless run of bad breaks. Only when a genetically engineered ex-military hunter, arrives on Earth does Jupiter begin to glimpse the fate that has been waiting for her all along.

Review: Jupiter Ascending is a full-on action flick which you might enjoy during the show, but will soon forget. It is a story of a seemingly insignificant individual, in this case Jupiter Jones (Kunis), suddenly thrust into a much larger and complicated universe than her day-to-day as a maid. As fate would have it, she happens to be the reincarnation of the matriarch of an extremely powerful dynasty that controls a vast industrial empire in the galaxy. The Wachowskis have created an incredibly elaborate alternate universe that is equally rich in scope and potential, but they fail to generate the depth to their characters. The scope is too ambitious for a single movie and too much happens too fast for people to start caring about the characters. Caine Wise (Tatum) was fun to watch. He plays Jupiter's brawny half-man, half-werewolf warrior-protector who zips through widescreen panoramas on jet-propelled boots, rescuing her over and over, duking it out with winged demons and sickly humanoid "Keepers" as spaceships crash through asteroid belts and skyscrapers, and explosions rumble and flash, and a symphony brass section topped by a quasi-mystical choir shrieks in your ears. Jupiter keeps falling and falling and falling and Caine keeps soaring in, Superman-style, to scoop her up in his arms. The problem is that the film fails to find a new or even halfway distinctive way to express itself. For all its noise and color, "Jupiter Ascending" looks, sounds and moves too much like every other sci-fi or fantasy adventure you've seen in the aftermath of the "Matrix" and "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" trilogies and "Star Wars" prequels. So if you are in the mood for another sci-fi which looks and feel cool, but doesn't offer anything new, then Jupiter Ascending is worth watching.

Reviewed by Mohammad Haque