The Unexpected Radicalness of ‘Jupiter Ascending’
The movie Jupiter Ascending (2015) is known for being awful. It’s a story that’s brought up as an example of how creative endeavors can just so utterly fail. The Wachowski sister’s project cost anywhere between $179 and $200 million, and that doesn’t include the cost of the film’s robust marketing campaign. However, it only made $183 million, which means that financiers did not get a return on investment.
It was also critically panned for being campy, overly saccharine, and ridiculous. Half the film takes place in a space cathedral tucked away beneath the surface of Jupiter, and that tipsy-topsy setting was enough to turn a lot of people off.
Underneath the questionable dialogue and fights scenes that drag on just a bit too long, however, is a fascinating treatise on the exploitative nature of mega-conglomerates and tax law (yes, I did write that sentence). It’s quite frankly a rare analysis in an age where texts praising rugged individualism and hustling are all too common. Critics' failure to captures this very transparent theme says something worrying about the state of media criticism — that we focus on aesthetics over a text’s substance and maybe, that our definition of a hero might very well be systemically flawed.
This movie is one of those subjects you can spend hours explaining and still seem like you’ve gone nowhere because it sounds utterly bonkers. The bare-bones premise is that a woman named Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) learns she is the genetic reincarnation of an intergalactic space monarch who died tens of thousands of years ago. Jupiter is now involved in a family turf war over who owns Earth and its inhabitants. Her three children named Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne), Titus Abrasax (Douglas Booth), and Kalique Abrasax (Tuppence Middleton) are each vying for her attention, or in some cases, trying to kill her outright, so that they can secure a better standing in the intergalactic stock market (we will get to that).
And that’s just a summary. We haven’t even gotten to the fact that some humans are part dog or that space vampires are a thing. The aesthetic of this movie comes greatly down to taste. You either think Kunis’ acting as a disgruntled housekeeper who hates her life is believable, or you don’t. You either love the Warhammer meets Guardians of The Galaxy style choices, or you think that they are childish and derivative, and at the time, most people gravitated towards the latter.
To reiterate, the critical consensus surrounding this movie was not just that it was terrible, but that it was one of the worst movies of the year, or even of all time. Gus Lubin hyperbolically wrote in Business Insider that the film “…[was] so bad it made [him] want never to go out to the movies again.” Eddie Redmayne earned a Razzie Award (from a spoof award ceremony which claims to honor the worst actors, directors, and films in Hollywood) for his performance as Balem.
Source: Razzie YouTube Channel — Razzie presenter Thushari Jayasekera announces Eddie Redmayne is the “winner” for that year’s worst supporting actor.
Before we address these criticisms, I want to emphasize that this film has noticeable issues that go back to its production. According to reporting from Deadline, the Wachowski sisters' closest ally at the company Warner Bros., president Jeff Robinov, left shortly after signing off on a lot of the film’s expenses. This situation meant that the ever-insular Wachowskis had the go-ahead for filming, but not a good contact person to represent the studio's interests.
While the Watsoskis have done great works, they are not infallible, and such insularity has impacted their decision-making in the past. When they made the 2012 flop Cloud Atlas, they received financing from dozens of sources to keep the filming going, including the mortgaging of their homes. This position again gave them the freedom to be really innovative. It also controversially allowed them to include the use of yellowface for some of their characters. There were arguably narrative reasons for this decision, but it has not aged well and is an example of how belief in an uncompromising vision can hurt the end product.
The insularity in Jupiter Ascending likewise means that some scenes, especially the action sequences, drag on a little too long, and many characters are poorly made. For example, Sean Bean’s Stinger Apini has a daughter named Kiza (Charlotte Beaumont), who is frustratingly underdeveloped. Jupiter first meets Kiza while a fight is happening in the background between Stinger Apini and Channing Tatum’s Caine Wise. Caine asks to speak with Kiza, and she tells the two of them: “Don’t drag me into your male mating rituals.” She then goes up to Jupiter and shakes her hand.
This introduction says everything that I need to know about Kiza — that she’s cool-under-pressure, funny, and confidant — and it's also the last major scene we see her in. She is sidelined several minutes later to focus on her father, Stinger. When I watched this film for the first time, I kept waiting for Kiza to return, but she never did. This type of mistake frequently happens in this film. There are very interesting characters in this universe we know next to nothing about, from talking space lizards to double-crossing bounty hunters.
I do not think Jupiter Ascending is a great film. It is not a Parasite (2019) or Sorry to Bother You (2018). I don't want to pretend like its this misunderstood gem whose flaws are secret strengths. It is structurally flawed on many levels, and any good critique should address them.
Its problems, however, are no worse than any other action movie, such as Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), that dotted the era. It seems strange that this film received so much hatred, especially when, unlike many other action films, it does address some truly thought-provoking themes and concepts that were rare for the time.
Regardless of your palette, this movie's philosophical foundations are much more complex than the “shoot the bad Decepticons” logic of the Transformer franchise. The central theme in Jupiter Ascending is not some trite observation about how how “good triumphs over evil,” but how commoditization can be harmful to society.
Yes, this movie is about the corrosive effects of capitalism.
In this world, our species’ origin is not Earth, but the planet Orous and the human race has settled most of the galaxy. The majority of these holdings, however, are not colonies, but biomass farms. Corporations such as Abrasax Industries grow their various worlds to the point where they are almost unsustainable. Then they harvest the humans on them to create an elixir called RegeneX, Nectar, or Abrasax, which is used to extend the lives of more “advanced” humans. Time has become the ultimate commodity. As Kalique Abrasax tells Jupiter:
“In your world people are used to fighting over resources like oil, or minerals, or land. But when you have access to the vastness of space, you realize there’s only one resource worth fighting over, even killing for. More time. Time is the single most precious commodity in the universe.”
The Abrasax have used their production of the elixir to refeudalize much of the galaxy. They are corporate monarchs or “Entitled,” leading a vast, planet-spanning empire and business. The children of the House of Abrasax have consequently become so far removed from the concerns of everyday people that they can literally shape their realities: they own planets like the rich own second homes, on a whim, they can construct thousands of robots to act as guests for a wedding ceremony, and all of their servants are biogenetically engineer to be in whatever form that their masters wish.
This removal from their fellow man is highlighted in how they view “less developed” humans as no more than cattle. The scene the Abrasax siblings are first introduced literally has them discussing harvested humans in much the same way we talk about the animals we consume here on Earth.
TITUS: “Have you ever seen a Harvest?
KALIQUE: “No. Never! But I’ve heard they feel no pain. It’s all quite humane from what I’ve been told.”
Source: Fandom.com —
The movie uses the language of ethical meat production to emphasize how far the upper class will justify the exploitation of their fellow human beings. This sci-fi element allows the Wachowskis to literalize the horror that comes about when a business commoditizes other humans, and it's hard to ignore. During the climax of the film, the viewer is hit over the head with this message when the big bad Balem monologues to Jupiter about how our state of nature is consumption:
“Life is an act of consumption. Jupiter, to live is to consume. Now the human beings on your planet are merely a resource waiting to be converted into capital. And this entire enterprise is just a small part in a vast and beautiful machine defined by evolution, designed to a single purpose — to create profit.”
In case you missed the entire plot, this theme is also constantly related to our world through Jupiter. Our capitalist system also devalues her worth. She is a maid on Earth who no one appreciates. She is even pressured at one point by her cousin to sell her eggs for cash, yet he tries to take the majority of the profits from this exchange, telling her: “That’s capitalism babe. Shit rolls downhill. Profits flow up.”
None of this is subtle.
It should be noted that this is not an alien opinion, either. We exist in a world where just a handful of people controls a disproportionate amount of our global wealth. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made headlines recently by becoming the first person with a wealth of over $200 billion. We are well on our way to experiencing a refeudilization here on Earth, and just like with the Abrasax, some of our “Entitled” hold contempt for the “less-developed” humans serving beneath them. Poor people who rely on social safety net programs are routinely derided as lazy or worse.
The anti-capitalist themes in Jupiter Ascending, while not a rarity in film history, were certainly a novelty with 2010 blockbusters. The anti-capitalist, sleeper-hit Snowpiercer (2014), for example, was not given a wide release in the United States because movie producer Harvey Weinstein (yes, that Weinstein) didn’t think it would be palatable to US audiences. We have only within the past few years, reached a point where films such as Parasite (2019), Ready or Not (2019), and Knives Out (2019) with capitalist-critical or, at the very least, anti-rich messaging have been widely celebrated.
Jupiter Ascending’s unabashed themes should have merited some wider discussion when this film first aired, but overwhelmingly, critics were instead bogged down in a sophomoric debate about the text’s “originality.”
The critics who mentioned Jupiter Ascending’s anti-capitalist messaging were far and in between. The largest outlet that did so was probably Emmet Asher-Perrin’s article ‘Jupiter Ascending is A Chilling Look at Our Possible Future, in More Ways Than One’ in the well-regarded online publication Tor.com. All other examples I can find which survived the test of time are small players such as WordPress and Tumblr blogs and a community post on the left-of-center website The Daily Kos.
The more professional critics did not touch this theme and instead focused on the film's “originality.” During the 2010s, we were in the middle of a reboot and sequel-mania, spurred by projects such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the recent Disney live-action films — a trend that still hasn’t ended. There was a fear among critics that “original” works would be harder and harder to come by if we didn’t support innovative directors such as the Wachowskis. Writers Brent Lang passionately penned an article in Variety titled ‘Jupiter Ascending’ Flops: Why the Wachowskis’ Failure Is Bad for Movies.’ In another example, Angela Watercutter made this message a call-to-action, writing:
“The script is uneven, the editing is weird, the performances are weirder, and, for added measure, it all lacks focus. Now shut up and go buy a ticket.”
This argument generated a backlash as some critics argued that no actually Jupiter Ascending was not original. Writer Ryan Britt, again from Tor.com, argued that Jupiter Ascending’s mishmash of various aesthetics made the text derivative and that its harvesting people plot was recycling elements from other texts such as Soylent Green (1973) and The Matrix (1999). On the site TV Over Mind, writer Aiden Mason even argued that the movie would have been better if it were based on a book.
Source: Martin Graupner YouTube Channel — the famous scene and meme where the protagonist realizes his primary food sources is made of corpses.
To be blunt, both the pro and the con sides of this debate are vapid. No story is completely original. All stories are remixing old themes and narratives to say something contemporary about the society they exist in. Soylent Green and Jupiter Ascending may both have plot elements about consuming people. Still, in Soylent Green, it's used to talk about themes of environmental degradation and overpopulation, while Jupiter Ascending is discussing consumption and alienation inside capitalism.
In many ways, this form of criticism treats originality like a commodity that someone can plug into a spreadsheet. (Take 2 Wachowskis. Add $170 million. Bam original work!). The vampire story Dracula, as another example, is also about consuming people, but that doesn’t mean Jupiter Ascending lacks artistic merit simply because Bram Stoker did it first. If story-telling were only about the plot, then we would never tell new stories again because all major plot elements have sort of already been done in one form or another.
Even the critics that tried to examine this work’s messaging often were unable to escape the lens of treating it like a commodity. To many, Jupiter’s actions were frustrating not because they were unrealistic, but because they cast aside the illusion of choice.
A common criticism of this film was that Jupiter Jones starts the movie as a maid scrubbing a toilet and ends the movie as a maid scrubbing a toilet. There was a general frustration in feminist circles that Jupiter lacks “agency” or the ability to impact the story. Channing Tatum’s Caine often has to rescue our protagonist. We often see Mila’s Jupiter wait patiently in an elegant dress, or as she’s falling, or sometimes even both. People wanted her to take charge and fulfill this conception of agency. This viewpoint is perhaps best summed up by Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post, writing:
“…But she’s also apparently not good enough to take on real stewardship of her own planet. Defying Balem’s insistence that she’s superior is a way for Jupiter to let herself off the hook for any responsibility she might have to raise Earth’s level of development or its standing in the galaxy, which has a lot more to offer than just an eternal-youth fixation.”
This mindset wants Jupiter to take on her mantle of power and use it to guide Earth in the “right” direction. It’s a desire for her to take control — to make a choice.
The thing about this interpretation is that it affirms the very same power structures Balem and his siblings upheld — that certain people deserve to rule. Yet, the film suggests that there is something wrong with placing yourself above others. When Jupiter confronts Balem in the climax about how she’s nothing like his mother, the idea of class is front and center in their conversation:
Balem: You should have stayed dead.
Jupiter: I am not your mother.
Balem: No, my mother never cleaned a toilet in her life.
Jupiter: Maybe that was her problem.
Our culture tends to create heroes that are not only the arbiters of their own realities but fit roles of extreme physical prowess or privilege. They are the knights, scholars, or kings of their world, and never the maids or dry cleaners. When I think of the most outstanding feminine heroes of pop culture, they are usually extraordinary, such as Furiosa (Charlize Theron) in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) or Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) in the Harry Potter series (2001–2011).
They more than just survive: they kickass.
In the multiple interviews I have read; however, it's clear that the Wachowskis wanted to craft a different kind of hero. They wanted to make a lead who was empathetic, flawed, as well as someone who used negotiation instead of violence to resolve her problems. Someone who was a very small part of a much larger universe. As Lana Wachowski remarked in an interview with Uproxx:
“That’s one of the biggest pieces of mythology offered up by the film, this idea that we are very young and we are not the center of the universe. We are made very small by the world imagined in this film, insignificant, and our entire history is rendered a footnote in something much bigger.”
If you, a normal person, were thrust into the strange, fantastical world of Jupiter Ascending, then you wouldn’t have the ability to topple the House of Abrasax or the Intergalactic Commonwealth. You’d barely be able to understand the rules of this new universe before being eaten alive by space lizards. I would too.
Jupiter imperfectly makes her way through this movie because she’s a human struggling in a corrosive system far larger than herself, which in a nutshell, is the story of most people struggling within our system. She makes decisions, but they often boil down to whether she works within the system (i.e., does she sign this contract or get married) or does she work outside of it. Her biggest choice is to go to a fortress beneath the planet of Jupiter to rescue her family, and tactically, it’s a flawed plan. She would have died without Caine’s heroics.
Her character upsets our classic model of agency. She is a hero who upsets the false belief that one person can heroically overcome and dismantle a bad system.
Jupiter Ascending is a flawed text that has many structural issues with its narrative and characters. By all means, dump on the zany fight scenes or Eddie Redmayne’s raspy voice.
Yet, the inability of critics to pick up on themes and messages that were very transparent to the plot, at times frustratingly so, reflects a gap in our ability as a society to recognize realistic heroes in our media, especially when those heroes our criticizing a system integral to our daily lives.
Nowhere is this point made more transparent than in the film's closing. The film ends with our lead, strangely happy. She has come to understand more about the universe around her, and she no longer wakes up in the morning, telling the viewer that she “hates her life.” Critics like Alyssa Rosenberg thought this made the narrative regressive because Jupiter has not changed her economic circumstances. She’s still at the bottom of the economic ladder.
Yet as she rides off into the sunset, the text suggests that this is a transitionary period. Caine asks her what she will do with her title as ruler of the Earth, and she claims that she’s still sorting it out herself. “Maybe,” says a smoldering Channing Tatum, “it just means that your majesty’s planet has a different future than the one that was planned for it.”
Often in science fiction, we like to think that a certain future is inevitable — that we will be like the planet Orous and spread humanity (and capitalism) to the far reaches of the galaxy. In its closing moments, Jupiter Ascending screams to its audience with all the subtlety of a bus crashing through your window, that maybe we can push for a different future.
In the meantime, we have to handle the dissonance of the here and now. Your shitty 9-to-5 (or increasingly, your 7-to-9) doesn’t go away simply because you have become cognizant of the oppressive nature of your reality, but that doesn’t mean you stop fighting for a better future anyway.
You put up with what you must and muster yourself to fight a battle that might last longer than the House of Abrasax itself.