Jupiter Ascending

I have trouble sitting back, relaxing, and enjoying a movie. The problem is so few movies are perfect, and, as I watch just about any movie, I feel the need to troubleshoot and mentally fix it. So it was with "Jupiter Ascending."

The first problem I saw was the pacing. (Well no, that's not true. The first problem was the movie opening with a voice over, which is almost always a bad sign.) This is a hard thing for action movies: You never want to reveal everything all at once because mysteries are intriguing, but you also need to establish the stakes early on. If two alien forces are going to destroy the city of Chicago, I need to know what they're fighting over. I need to be rooting for one side or the other here, because, if I'm not, all other things being equal, I have to end up rooting for Chicago to not be destroyed, which really gets in the way of me enjoying the visual spectacle of explosions, which is what fight scenes should really be about. "Jupiter Ascending" kept me just enough in the dark for me to be confused about the stakes when it counted, and revealed just enough so that I wasn't actually surprised by anything.

The second problem was the tone. I really couldn't tell whether "Jupiter Ascending" knew when it was being funny. Most of the time it seemed to take itself pretty seriously, and the result, quite frankly, was hilarious, but sometimes it did something very deliberately hilarious (the intractable bureaucracy comes to mind) that did not quite fit the seemingly straight-faced persona of the rest of the movie. This left me confused as to whether I was laughing at or with the movie, and that's never a good place to be.

The third problem was genre. "Jupiter Ascending" wanted to be a sci-fi action movie, a chick flick, and an intergalactic political thriller all at once. It did not succeed, and, I'm afraid, in the attempt, managed to appeal to the intersection of the intended audiences rather than their union. It didn't help that the chick flick part of it was absolutely full of cringe-inducing dialogue.

To my surprise, despite these three very major flaws, I found myself enjoying the movie, and not in the sense that it was so bad, it was good (which I think was the opinion of many people in the theater), but in the sense that despite the bad, it was good. This led to an epiphany: The problems I had diagnosed were problems, but they were not the problem. The problem was the form. "Jupiter Ascending" is not a great movie, but it has all the makings of an awesome TV show.

Think about it (some minor spoilers follow): We've got an ordinary girl who finds out that, not only is there a huge universe out there that she's never dreamed about, but also she's the empress of the whole thing. We've got not one, not two, but three villains with intricate, interwoven plans and complex backstories (not to mention a couple of minions worth developing a piece). We have hints at explanations for the extinction of the dinosaurs, reincarnation, Baalim, vampires, Roswell grays, crop circles, (with a stretch) werewolves, dragons, and (with a bigger stretch) the Egyptian gods. We find out there's a fortress inside of the planet Jupiter and all of Earth is just a pawn in a game of intergalactic chess between powerful players who are also humans, which is apparently a kind of master race that did not start on Earth. We have human-animal hybrids created by "Splicers" who brand their property. Heck, we have a mouse-person as the number one assistant to one of the most powerful men in the universe. How could the story of how that came to pass possibly not be interesting? We have a galactic legion of soldiers under the command of who knows who and a totally dysfunctional bureaucracy that even an empress can't bypass. We have an ex-soldier with a complicated past and some sort of chief of police who has a daughter that can be used against him. We have cloning experiments gone wrong and a commerce system that revolves around the buying and selling of human cells. Just think about the possibilities here! How could this not be awesome?

By shoving it all into a two hour movie. That's how.