Jupiter Ascending

Ascension Of Disbelief

Jupiter Ascending
2015  US
Directed by The Wachowski Sibs 
UK cinema release print.

You know, I so wanted to title this review Jupiter, Arse Ending, because I’d already been primed by the film’s promotional trailer, to expect one of the worst sci-fi films ever made. Seriously, just like Kingsman, The Secret Service (a film I reviewed here), the trailer for Jupiter Ascending did absolutely nothing to make me want to go and see this movie. The trailer's a mess of clunky dialogue and hollow, non-contextual special effects clips that actually put me off wanting to go for this one. And if I’d missed seeing this one at the cinema, I might never had gotten around to it because a trailer this bad... blimey! And that would have been a shame, as it turns out.

So why did I luck out and go and see it then? Simple. I heard that Sony Music they were releasing a double CD album of the film’s score by one of my favourite contemporary composers, Michael Giacchino. Now, Giacchino’s involvement alone would not have gotten me into the cinema and past that awful trailer, to be honest. What actually got me there was the fact that a double CD album meant that Sony were invested in releasing two discs of a score... so they must have had some faith in it. A score must be pretty special to get the two disc treatment these days and, since I’d already been to see what can only be the worst film I’ll see this year, and a lot of other years besides, Mortdecai (which I review here), I figured there was surely no way that Jupiter Ascending could be anywhere near as bad as that movie had turned out to be.

And so I went to the cinema last night to see, and hear, Jupiter Ascending for myself... and I was both delighted and disappointed by it.

Delighted because it’s, frankly, a damned good escapist, pulp sci-fi movie which is rarely pulled off as entertainingly as this one is and disappointed because, as I said in my opening line, now I don’t get to use my cool Jupiter, Arse Ending title for the review. Damn!

So why does the film work so well?

A friend of mine, Jason Pyke, had told me that it was a bit like Dune crossed with Brazil and that’s a pretty good little summation, I think... one which I’ll look at in more detail in a minute. It’s pretty much a film which covers all the bases and is influenced by a lot of science fiction and space opera over the years. A lot of the influences are not hard to pinpoint and there’s really no reason why this mess of a movie should hold together as well as it does... but it somehow seems to pull it all together and transcend the possible disasters that most postmodern amalgams fall prey to... and has fun doing it along the way.

Some of the things that really shouldn’t work are the clunky dialogue that actors and actresses like Mila Kunis (as the perfectly pulpily named Jupiter Jones), Channing Tatum, Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne are having to try to say whilst keeping a straight face. It’s seriously bad in some places but the performances, coupled with the way it’s edited, seem to make up for it in a way that the trailer, to be fair, couldn’t have possibly been able to hide. The always brilliant Eddie Redmayne (see my reviews of his films My Week With Marilyn and The Theory of Everything) is somewhat uncharacteristically over the top here... using a terrible ‘treacherous royalty’ kind of accent and a performance which should leave you laughing but... I honestly don’t know how he got away with it but it just about works here... strangely enough.

There are a few things, asides from the performances and awesome visual effects, that the film does have going for it. It really is not unlike the Dune books by Frank Herbert, although the ‘spice’ has been replaced, right up front, by a commodity which will have any sci-fi fan worth his or her salt quoting a certain famous Charlton Heston line from the movie Soylent Green. However, to offset the tone, the film seems to work with the same kind of methodology of a Roger Corman movie... but instead of a scene of gratuitous nudity inserted for every ten pages of script, you have an action sequence to offset any of the plot as it runs it’s course. So it’s very much... talk - action scene - talk - action scene - talk - action scene in the most transparent way but it works like the best examples of that kind of escapist product works, the same way an old Doc Savage novel or a good 1930s - 1950s theatrical serial might work. And it keeps you entertained.

Also, it’s noticeable that a lot of Joseph Campbell’s theories about ‘story and myth’, the ones that George Lucas was making such a fuss about a little while ago, are woven, almost by default, into the story and screenplay... so it works really well when you have ‘magical aids’ to the heroine’s “call to adventure” like antigravity boots and the control of bees thrown into the mix. It’s wild and hilarious at some levels but it moves so fast that you never get the time to be anything other than caught up in the story.

And, yes, you do have a sudden insert into the middle of the movie which is basically ten minutes of Franz Kafka as filtered by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil... which somehow fits right into things and is capped off with a lovely little cameo of a role played by Terry Gilliam himself. A nice little cherry on the cake for that scene and, like I said, this movie is not exactly quiet about its various influences.

Fans of British comics who are familiar with the famous, multi-part epic Judge Dredd story The Day The Law Died will also recognise a strangely winged variation of the terrifying Kleggs, although they are not actually called that here. Also, the arguably ‘real life’ aliens known world wide as The Greys are mixed into this intoxicating cocktail of a movie in a way which is both sinister and representative of their place and function in modern Urban Myth and UFO Folklore. In fact, after a bit of a clunky scene, it was these characters who really pulled me into the mythology of the movie and allowed me to "buy in" to what the Wachowski’s are trying to achieve here... which is, at the end of the day, a hugely entertaining pulp fest reminiscent, it’s true, of various 1950s sci-fi stories but with a lot of heart behind the spirit of the final product... and a lot of action too.

Now, while Jupiter Ascending is unlikely to be winning any awards, it does have a strong, central female protagonist and an underlying romantic story set to a background of upper echelon, royalty and politics... and a heck of a lot of punching, fighting, chasing and general mayhem exploding onto the screen at the drop of a hat. If you go and see this movie, love it or hate it, one thing you are not going to be is fed up with it.

Oh, and as for that Giacchino score I was so anxious to hear... fantastic. Operatic and action packed scoring which isn’t completely buried in the mix and will have you tapping your toes along with the galactic obliteration. It’s a great score for a great little, big budgeted B-movie. A B-movie which, impressively, transcends its short-comings, of which there are many, and polishes it up into a fast moving, entertaining thrill ride which is over way too quickly. Definitely a film that should find its audience, I think. And if you like pulp sci-fi adventure yarns, you should seek it out too.

The Zero Theorem

Zero Wolf

The Zero Theorem
2013 USA/Romania/UK
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Kind of a big spoiler in here about the end of the movie, depending on your point of view.

Terry Gilliam has always been a bit of a directing hero for me... so I wish I didn’t feel like I have to write this review and make the kind of judgement I do on it. I alluded to my experiences with The Zero Theorem in my previous review of Under The Skin (reviewed here) and I’m afraid I had less than a good time with this one.

I find his films, themselves, a bit hit or miss but, ultimately, Gilliam is an individual artist (yeah, he’s an auteur, for sure), mostly uncompromising (as far as I know) and always interesting. My favourites of his films: Brazil, The Adventures Of Baron Munchhausen, The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys are all pretty incredible in their own way, each of them either a major or minor masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned. And The Zero Theorem is no different in its inventiveness than any of these four movies... which is why it annoys me to deliver a harsher call on this one.

The Zero Theorem has a hell of a lot going for it, though. So let’s get all the good stuff out of the way first.

For starters, it’s got absolutely kick ass actors including a bald Christoph Waltz, who is always watchable (even in The Green Hornet, reviewed here) and, another of my personal favourites, David Thewlis, playing the line manager at the company Waltz works for. All the supporting actors were pretty cool too and, added to this, you have an intricate and art directed to death, dystopian world created for them to all work in. An alternative version of our world perhaps, in the future, where advertising and hard edged consumerism has taken over and trivialised the human existence even more... like we all knew it would. We should have heeded Philip K. Dick when we had the chance. It is a highly detailed clutter of a world with a slightly unreal feeling to it (which I’m sure is deliberate) and a sense of chaos which is directly reflective of the times we are now, unfortunately, living in... and it all works really well.

Conceptually this film is, still, a bit of a masterwork. The “crunching” which is the sole purpose of our hero Qohen Leth (played by Waltz) and his co-workers, is a job which is laboured with game-pads, bicycles, computer screens and software, which comes in a liquid form, to the extent that the actual understanding of the mechanism of the work the people in the film do is just a notch beyond our comprehension... we just see it as a video game analogy of something approximating hard work but conceived in a way which is alien to our way of thinking at present. Which of course further enhances the far flung future aspect of the environment that the film’s main protagonist inhabits.

After an encounter at a party in which Qohen finally gets to talk to the elusive “management”, he is reassigned to work from home on a concept called The Zero Theorem. His goal, as we perceive it, is to guide blocks of formula into walls in a virtual landscape to prove the idea that “Zero must equal 100%” without destroying the integrity of the formula and causing all the formula built structures in the framework to come tumbling down, which they inevitably do... frequently. This is a special project which has already, over the years, seen many people burn-out while trying to solve it and, by the end of the film, when Qohen has abandoned the girl who he loves for his all important work and the promise of his delusion of a “life affirming” phone call, we find that Qohen really is no different from all the others who have tried to solve this apparently unsolvable puzzle. Or is he? With his final descent we are, perhaps, left with the assumption that, ulitimately, life really does have no meaning and that Zero, does indeed, equal 100%. In fact, by the end of the film, I’m not even sure the main character even ever existed as anything more than a virtual reality within the memory banks of a computer where he thinks he works... nor even that the computer, indeed, like anything in the movie, even exists.

Who is doing the asking, for example? Qohen’s boss or God? And is there a difference? And does it matter? The simple answer, perhaps, is no... who cares?

And therein lies my main problem with the movie... I don’t care and, honestly, if Gilliam is trying to prove that either life has no purpose, or at least that life has no purpose that man is able to comprehend, then thanks but... like most people I imagine... I already knew that. Life is pretty meaningless and seems to be about chasing bits of money which are completely unimportant.

Now I’ve often said on here that the end of a movie doesn’t really matter if the build up is good. Like sex, a good tease as a set up doesn’t mean you have to finish in the most traditional way if you don’t want to... and I still say that. The Zero Theorem is nothing, if not one long tease of a movie. But something left me feeling underwhelmed with it... it’s like I was wrestling and hanging on with complex issues dressed up as fun but it felt like there was too much melting ice cream and nothing, really, of the main meal... to mix my metaphors somewhat. It just felt like empty window dressing to get us to a point where the writer of the movie says... “Hey, you know what? It’s been fun but I’m going now. Please lock up on your way out.”

It felt anti-climactic and, although I’m a big fan of movies crammed with exploratory ideas, and this film has them in spades, I was just left unimpressed and, worse, uninterested in the events on screen. Tellingly, this is not the kind of movie I could watch as a repeat viewing... which seems a strange thing for me to be saying about a Terry Gilliam film but, there you have it, I’ve said it and I’m disappointed by that but I have to be honest about this stuff.

I wouldn’t recommend this movie to anyone who isn’t either a) a big fan of Gilliam’s work (which I am) or b) a big fan of movies with a lot of cluttered concepts in them (which I also am)... and even then, it would be to see it as a bit of a talking point rather than something I would really urge that kind of person to look at as a good time at the movies. This one gets a big zero from me, I’m sorry to say, but it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things... I’m still looking forward to seeing the next Terry Gilliam movie already because, after all, when he’s good he’s great but when he’s bad... he’s interesting.