Film Review - Jupiter Ascending

Considering the amount of heavyweights in the cast, you would think that one of them might have stood up and said that the script needed a bit of work.

The visuals are excellent. I never really like CGI characters appearing on screen with real actors, Jar-Jar Binks has really ruined that for the foreseeable future, but the half-lizard henchmen are smooth enough, as are the half-elephantine pilot and the androids (I assume androids because this is one of many things that isn't explained). This illusion may be helped by the prosthetics featuring on many of the other actors. Tatum's half-wolf is explained but there also seem to be half-bat, half-blackbird and so on.

The political machinations are a bit convoluted. Not quite the nonsensical complexity of the Star Wars prequels, but messy enough that they distract from the story as you try and keep up. The role of the Aegis as interstellar police is covered, but when they are actually called on to enforce the law they are actually a bit useless. Legions, Skyjackers, and host of others get throwaway mentions in what obviously should be a larger universe. A lot of this needed fleshing out a bit more.

The 5 minute Terry Gilliam steampunk bureaucracy segue in the middle has his fingerprints so heavily on it that there is almost an anti-climax when he appears at the end of it. 

But up to this point I still really enjoyed it. It was great to watch, plenty going on, decent performances, although Kunis does seem to phone it in a bit in terms of a toilet cleaner not being shocked about being the owner of this planet and several others.

Eddie Redmayne is disappointing. He will be hoping that none of the Oscar voters saw this effort until after they had cast their vote for his Stephen Hawking impression in Theory of Everything. 

The real problem comes with trying to squeeze the film into 2 hours. It really should have been two films but I can understand that the Wachowskis couldn't do that. They would have effectively have had to cut it so that the first film was just the Matrix but with space instead of computers and then created a vastly different film for their sequel. The result being that the second film would have to be such a massive change of pace and vision and they can't afford to have another sequel like that on their record after the disasters of the Matrix sequels. So I understand why they cut it to one film, I just think that the amount of explanatory scripting they had to sacrifice to make that work was too heavy a price to pay.   

I am going to give it 7 out of 10, but I feel maybe I am being a little generous here.