100 FILMS IN 2015 → Jupiter Ascending (2015)
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
“I CREATE LIFE!! …And I destroy it.”
- Here is my feeling about this movie: it is your garbage. It is garbage for you. “Is this how straight dudes feel at the movies all the time????” I hissed SEVERAL times during this movie. “Like someone carefully noted down your early pubescent fantasies and then threw 100 MILLION DOLLARS at them?”
- Top marks go to evil space royal Eddie Redmayne, whose breathy ennui is offset by bouts of mummy’s boy shrieking, all delivered with a “petite-mort” look on his face that suggests he is being fellated by eternity itself.
- Someone on tumblr described it as the novel all girls wrote when they were 14 and frothing with a mix of swelling hormones and fading Disney fantasies, which I have to say is accurate to the point of pain. I mean, gorgeous Russian toilet scrubber finds out she is actually a space princess when a werewolf space marine rescues her from death at the hands of Greys? Pardon me, werewolf ANGEL space marine with a Sad because his wings are gone. And then everything is Alexander McQueen dresses and melodrama and bees, for some reason, and Eddie Redmayne doing his best heroin-addicted Voldemort impression.
- The plot is this: 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 and began to inhabit its own universe, complete with original characters, wolf-men, and bees. That’s Jupiter Ascending.
Every word is truth. Gods, I love that movie.
@thewriterflo thought this review, as well as the one I gave at our writing group last week, had been charmingly exaggerated for comedy. So she came over with some rum and I rented the movie.
“Oh, Channing Tatum really IS a sad space angel wolfboy who’s here to rescue the space princess… on skates. Okay.”
I honestly fucking love Jupiter Descending, you can almost HEAR toe 12-14YO author having a three-chapter argument with their own characters on FFN, just like you can almost HEAR Queen’s Wedding March from Flash fucking Gordon in that one scene. You know the one.
God knows which fandom it was originally for, because it is the AU crossover fic to end all AU crossover fics. This imagined kid saw Dune and Star Wars back-to-back whilst devouring too much sugar and had to give a nod to Twilight whilst they were there. And then they gave a cameo to the Gargoyles whilst casting all the vampires as the planet-killing immortals because they KNOW that everyone actually wanted the werewolves to win…
And then they have an inexplicable chapter set entirely in a giant planet-sized version of the DMV because their Mom/Guardian had to drag them along and it totally took 5-EVER, U guys…
All the Wachowskis did was remove all the ‘totally’s from the narrative and dialogue, tone down the caps lock, excise the author asides about [INSERT TEEN HEARTTHROB], and string together some of the looser plot points with a little bit of bullshittium.
AND IT’S PURE FUCKING GOLD!
If you haven’t watched this movie, you really should. It is a thing of beauty.
(via primarybufferpanel)