Jupiter Ascending review: Most ridiculous sci-fi saga ever - and it cost £115m! 

By Brian Viner, Film Critic for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:49 EST, 5 February 2015 | Updated: 20:53 EST, 5 February 2015

Jupiter Ascending (12A)

Verdict: Derivative

Rating:

The question here is not if Jupiter is ascending, but whether the Wachowskis’ star is falling.

Lana and Andy Wachowski are the writer-director siblings who created the fabulously successful Matrix films, but haven’t excited the box-office since.

And I doubt they will with this science-fiction adventure, despite its enormous budget, reportedly £115 million, and Warner Brothers’ vigorous promotional campaign.

Most sci-fi films are daft, but they mustn’t stray too far beyond belief; this does.

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Channing Tatum plays a half-albino extra-terrestrial warrior in Jupiter Ascending, which had a budget of £115m

Channing Tatum plays a half-albino extra-terrestrial warrior in Jupiter Ascending, which had a budget of £115m

Mila Kunis (pictured) plays Jupiter Jones, the American daughter of a Russian mother and English father

Mila Kunis (pictured) plays Jupiter Jones, the American daughter of a Russian mother and English father

Mila Kunis plays Jupiter Jones, the American daughter of a Russian mother and English father, who considers herself very much an earthling, and works as a domestic cleaner, but ends up being whisked up, up and away to inherit an intergalactic empire.

Assisting this unlikely Cinderella in an even more unlikely sequence of events is Caine Wise, who is not a hybrid of Michael Caine and Ernie Wise, but couldn’t be any more ridiculous if he were. 

Instead, he is a half-albino extra-terrestrial warrior played by Channing Tatum, whose brother-in-arms, the Eric to his Ernie, is played (Sheffield accent intact) by Sean Bean.

That huge budget has at least bagged quite a cast.

Eddie Redmayne is the evil alien overlord with designs on Earth and a tendency to speak in a strangulated whisper, and actually he’s rather good, as is Douglas Booth as his younger, marginally less evil brother.

But it’s all too derivative, strongly influenced by Star Wars and even Star Trek, and with one scene that might have been lifted straight from Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley.

 

Still Life (12A)

Verdict: Sweet study of loneliness

Rating:

Firmly at the opposite end of the spectrum of realism from Jupiter Ascending is Still Life, a small, melancholy but sweet film about a funeral officer, John May, employed by a London council to bury or cremate people in the borough who have had the misfortune of dying without anyone to give them a send-off.

He is played by Eddie Marsan, one of the best in the business at seeming to shoulder the cares of the world, and it’s a lovely, unshowy performance, with solid support from Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt as the estranged daughter of one of John’s friendless corpses. 

The writer-director is Uberto Pasolini, who was apparently motivated by his own bouts of isolation, following divorce and separation from his children, to create this poignant, gentle study of loneliness.

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