Jupiter Ascending is the new space opera film that shares DNA with The Phantom Menace, Battlefield Earth, The Matrix, John Carter, Flash Gordon, Brazil, Mass Effect, and Guardians of the Galaxy… all poured into a goulash and served luke-warm.If that doesn’t sound like a strong recommendation, you would be correct. This is mediocre to bad sci-fi epic that puts a ton of money on the screen – it looks great – but has a terrible script and even worse action scenes.

The script is really the problem – yes this is a big intentionally dopey crowd-pleasing-type sci-fi action flick, but the way they tell the story and drop knowledge bombs and exposition, it endlessly fails to be coherent, descriptive, and compelling. It feels like the movie is being rushed and is uninterested in its own universe.It’s not incomprehensible… it’s just poorly explained.

This movie was delayed 6 months from a summer 2014 release to an early-2015 release which is never a good sign. Why this was done is officially unknown and might have something to do with boosting FX… but might also be trimming the running time and making it more jumbled, hurried, and quick-cutted to death.

The big set piece action scenes are just a lot of noise, moving parts, and explosions – no real coherence or sense of place – just all the usual big FX editing that just feels like they want to one-up, say, Star Wars and do so by tossing shit at the screen (hey, the Star Wars preqeuls had this problem too).

But it’s not an absolute disaster – I inexplicably enjoyed some of it (usually not the action or exposition scenes). It’s ultimately a wish-fulfillment story with huge Matrix-y themes and it doesn’t hurt you get to stare at Mila Kunis for two hours (or Channing Tatum if you swing that way – and you get his requisite sequences of him shirtless so we’re definitely in “your welcome” mode).

Unfortunately, it’d have been nice if Mila Kunis actually had agency and wasn’t just being kidnapped and rescues over and over again by Tatum on his space skates. Don’t mean to jump onto a social justice band-wagon here, but it’s her movie but it shares way too much DNA with 1920 cliffhangers (“eek! Who will save me!?”). Yes, how about a strong, intelligent, capable space heroine? No? Yes? Maybe? Sigh. I get that she’s the average guy/gal put into a crazy world of sci-fi laser guns and rocket ships but there’s gotta be something more they could have done besides let her beat up the weakest villain (poor Eddy Redmayne).

Also, Channing Tatum has a pair of gravity boots that lets him be XTREME… roller-blading through the air, grinding on rails and building ledges, etc. It’s eye-rolling… unless you are the kind of person who finds that awesome and not just pandering.

The stuff that I liked (or at least didn’t hate) is pretty indefensible if you think the whole space opera goofiness of it is not to your taste. This stuff is campy and weird to the point of perhaps I could give all the nonsense that didn’t work a pass… but it runs too long and is still a mess story-wise.

This is largely a pass unless you just love big doofy space operas, you just love the cast, or you are a Wachowski completest. Some day those Wachowskis will get back to the level of The Matrix (the first one)… it’s hard to believe the solid film making of that movie devolved into the mess of this one.

Score: 69