I saw Jupiter Ascending.
It's not Chronicles of Riddick-level good and will never be a Fifth Element-level all time classic, but it is a decent movie. Not particularly good, yet not worthy of bombing atrociously. The Wachowskis have definitively lost their "first Matrix/Bound" touch for concise storytelling.
Cajun King, on 07 February 2015 - 12:56 AM, said:
Chance, on 06 February 2015 - 11:56 PM, said:
Saw Jupier Ascendent expecting a bad SF movie with some cool action scenes...not that in a sane universe everyone who was part of the film creation team should be shot except for the people doing the 3d enviroments (which where admittedly awesome).
It is however well to know that I'm unlikely to watch a movie that bad in a year or two.
I'm Not clear on if your saying you like JA or hated it in this post.
There are a few things that contribute mightily to extremely dour reviews of Jupiter Ascending:
1) Every preview for every movie before this looked awful. A stinker of a trailer or two can be overlooked. A solid run of unappetizing trailers doesn't lead in well to what is going to be my second point.
2a) This is a complicated space opera movie. It's supposed to be grandiose, full of larger than life characters, have lots of jumps between places and much scene chewing by the actors. The audiences and dumber critics can deal with this if it's in an easy to understand and/or well executed shape like Star Wars, Hunger Games or something like the Pixar movies.
2b) It doesn't execute the complicated part of the space opera superbly (splitting the villains into three was philosophically interesting, but emotionally blaaah), the directors cluttered the middle of the movie up with action sequences that are unnecessarily long and the actors don't ham it up enough when it's time to go full HAM.
2c) With the tri-partite villain structure, the action sequences that go on a bit too long and the lack of easy-to-glom-onto performances, it's hard to expect an audience/dumber critics to invest themselves in what's going on.
All in all, this was actually a decent movie and the action sequences are fun (enough to justify IMAX ticket prices).
Tatum's personal shield doohickey is overpowered, but the anti-gravity speedskating thing is wonderful - especially when capoiera gets involved. The set design and the overall artistry was very high level. Tatum was pretty good, but they didn't have to give him the elf ears (he never used them) to differentiate him. He's already distinct enough with the boots, the physical presence and his story centrality. Kunis was solid as the Russian emigrant turned space princess. Redmayne, Booth and Middleton are solid in their roles with Redmayne getting the majority of the publicity because of The Theory of Everything.
Thematically, it was kind of cool how the Wachowskis gave Jupiter three threats of "going along with a not obviously evil system because it's easy; being convinced the evil thing isn't that evil because it saves the 'right' people; having to cave into the evil thing because your loved ones are threatened". She has to deal with them all in order to be at peace/work for a better world, which I like.
I kind of wish they'd streamlined things a bit (keeping the space visits to just Jupiter the planet and the glorious wedding scene) and put in more spots for Kunis and Tatum to ham it up with the other characters/display their humor. The 5th Element did that wonderfully and Chronicles of Riddick found enough spots to do that too. I also think there might have been more Redmayne and Middleton scenes, which I would have appreciated.
This post has been edited by amphibian: 10 February 2015 - 08:39 PM
I survived the Permian and all I got was this t-shirt.