Jupiter Ascending - Desk Jockey Five Second Review

We both came out with similar impressions. I liked this movie more than I thought because I had zero expectations. You are absolutely right that the main characters are wooden and lifeless. The dialog is miserable... but the creativity and visuals in the universe, the world building, is quite good IMHO and I enjoyed that.

And space rollerblades.

I spent the first half mocking it, but somehow by the second half was enjoying myself. Though Eddie Redmayne never worked. No idea how he can win an Oscar and be that bad in one year, though Sandra Bullock did win a Razzie and an Oscar in the same year so it is not unprecedented.

I read a review that summed it up so well: "the Wachowskis were given an extraordinary amount of money to make whatever the hell they wanted, and what they wanted to make is exactly what we all, secretly, deep down, want to make: the big-screen adaptation of that Stargate fanfic you wrote when you were fourteen that really went off the rails"

I've never met a Wachowski bros. film that I liked... I mean loved.

Look, they just cannot do character or conversation whatsoever. Everything is stilted and awkward in their films... there is an art to that, there is an aesthetic there... but it's steeped in awful. A part of their aesthetic is embracing stilted characters and shitty dialogue. Which they clearly like for some reason.

But how they frame it sort of changes how we see it. Their films often seem better than they are for me (and worse than they are for others)... I loved Speed Racer even though it's honestly not a very good film. But there is more adventurousness and uniqueness in that film than in ten of almost anybody else's films. These fucking guys cannot sit still, they're trying to invent at every corner. They just don't understand how humans interact.

I noticed all this when I saw the first Matrix film and I hated it... everyone else loved it... I've come to realize that we were both wrong and I now like the film quite a bit.. I even enjoyed (gasp) parts two and three all right. They all have flaws, the central conceit isn't nearly as original as people think, having several precedents in literature and comics (and probably film if I was more of a film buff). But the pace is awesome and the movie does invent here and there. Something they actually got better at as time went on.

I liked Cloud Atlas (book and movie), I'll watch Jupiter Ascending.

In other words, you review sounds exactly right. These are the films they make and sometimes that works and other times... it only works a little bit. But the result is pretty much always worth checking out.

What a stinking pile of shit this movie was. I can't even think of one pleasant thing to say about it. The most clumsy and incomprehensibly boring exposition I've ever seen. Just plain awful storytelling. Tension? None. Fucking forgettable shitty dialogue. Visually all over the place and SO busy and gaudy. Stylistically all over the place with no apparent cohesion whatsoever. Space ships/tech shit were uninspired and generic and no better than a video game. Backgrounds/CGI look unreal and do not suspend disbelief. Dull, lazy, cliched villains. Some scenes were just like watching a ren-faire act. Vomitous.

Not even the action scenes were any good! Sean Bean, who I love, gets to play Lando. Or Landorimir. Ugh. Then let's count the number of times Channing Tatum has to narrowly rescue the Mila Kunis from signing a contract. Ugh. More than once! The sequence where they have to go through all these bureaucratic offices... talk about tired cliches FUCK that was just embarrassing.

Ok, here's my positive take: Finally something worse than John Carter of Mars.