Mladen and Del review: ‘Jupiter Ascending’

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers.

“Jupiter Ascending” Starring Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth, and Tuppence Middleton. Directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski. 127 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Mladen’s take

Ignore the critics – except me and Del, if he agrees with me – on this one. “Jupiter Ascending” is a good movie. You just have to be patient.

Like another solid film, “Cloverfield,” with a crappy beginning, “JA” starts poorly, but makes up for its first 15 minutes with good acting and spectacular, if sometimes overwhelming, visual effects for the duration.

The plot: Housekeeper Jupiter Jones, portrayed by Mila Kunis, becomes a pawn in a power struggle between three well-heeled siblings. Rather than agreeing to share, each sibling maneuvers to gain legal ownership of Earth. Why is Earth important? Us. Mankind is valuable to the feuding House of Abrasax because we’re the essential ingredient of Fountain of Youth baths that the siblings, and others who can afford the gene-repairing topical, use to live forever. Each sibling wants Earth to himself, or herself, to harvest Homo sapiens for a profit. The problem? Jupiter, a “recurrence,” is technically Earth’s owner. She has to sign over the rights before anyone can start distilling people for their life forces. Add Caine Wise, played by Channing Tatum, as Jupiter’s guardian and, eventually, main squeeze, and you’ve the ingredients for a raucous, FTL-traveling, city-busting movie that hits the Bull’s Eye more often than it misses.

“JA” owns its watchability to Kunis. She’s wonderful. Along with a pretty face and lovely voice, her acting renders the movie’s silliness and science implausibilities perfectly acceptable.

When Wise explains to Jupiter how his airskates work, she retorts with a straight face that all she heard was “gravity” and “surf,” or something to that effect. With a throaty giggle, Jupiter wonders at the beauty of a swarm of bees becoming an extension of her arms so that they look like wings. Her ability to playful neutralize an event’s absurdness comes into play throughout the film and it works every time.

The film’s principal weakness, one shared today by all movies of the sci-fi kind, is its CGI battles. So much happens so fast and each component of the battle rendered in such fine detail that the contrast between elements of the fight disappears. Sound effects, however, are superb. Also helpful would have been a battle between capital ships, but that ain’t a big flaw.

I found it goofy that the Wachowskis decided to keep Wise’s shirt off as he fought mercenaries on Earth, traveled through space in a dimension-busting vessel’s cargo hold or something like that, and then fought a squad of palace guardians on another planet. He’s buff, but come on. In the name of gender equality, the script writers could have devised a reason to put Jupiter in a bikini for 20 or 30 minutes.

Finally, I wasn’t entirely enamored with the film’s fusion of sci-fi with mythology-like creatures. It was sort of Thor-ish and Lord of the Ring-esque. The movie also had bits of “Brazil,” lots of machines shape-shifting Transformer-like and a couple of other movies that slip my mind.

“Jupiter Ascending” is frenetic and worth seeing. It’s been unfairly, and spitefully, panned like one of the Wachowski’s other good films, “Speed Racer.” “JA” is an epic for the big screen, but I plan to add it to my Blu-Ray library. I imagine I’ll find something fresh every time I watch it, which is typical of Wachowski productions. The grade? B for Better than Bargained for.

Del’s take

They hate Channing Tatum’s eyeliner.

The plot, they say, is too complex.

One of them called the movie a “hot mess.”

Another suggested the Wachowskis should be banned from moviemaking.

Bottom line? As usual, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

The folks who write reviews on Airbooks as they sip Merlot from soap bubble-thin crystal fairy goblets are having a hard time embracing “Jupiter Ascending,” the raucous actionfest engineered by the Wachowskis. That suits me fine. Sometimes you just want to be entertained, not edified. That’s the kind of movie the Wachowskis have given us.

Mladen summed up the plot nicely. You do have to wade through some explanation before things kick into gear, but so what? Are we no longer capable of embracing complexity? I do every time I sign into my phone.

“Jupiter Ascending” is gorgeous to look at. Virtually every frame is a visual extravaganza that will leave you swooning amid its depth and color. In terms of its visual composition I’d compare it to “Casshern,” another beautiful movie.

And it continues the Wachowskis’ assault on the oppressive, soul-smothering system they believe enslaves us all, a theme they explored in the “Matrix” movies, “V for Vendetta” and “Cloud Atlas” (which, by the way, was another criminally underrated Wachowski project). Jupiter is an individual trapped between forces much larger and stronger than her own puny self. She fights back with pluck and virtue, and in the Wachowskis’ universe there can be only one outcome.

Mark your calendars, folks, because on this date Mladen and I agree: “Jupiter Ascending” is well worth seeing in the theater, then owning once the DVD is released. Everyone in our group enthusiastically embraced the movie, the fairy cup sippers notwithstanding.

I too give it a solid B, maybe a B+, for sheer entertainment value.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical editor. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.

My 1987 Nissan Pulsar is parked in front of my old townhouse, Unit 3F at 215 Hughes Avenue in Fort Walton Beach behind Uptown Station. I lived there 24 years. Image by Del Stone Jr.

I’m gone from the townhouse.

It was a sad moment. I spent the morning hauling boxes of books and photo albums from the upstairs bedroom, what was once my office where I wrote “Dead Heat,” “Black Tide” and “I Feed the Machine,” among many other works of fiction. I vacuumed the place, swept the floors, scrubbed the toilets and cleaned the oven.

When I moved to the townhouse, way back in June 1990, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. For the first time in my adult life I had central air and heat. A swimming pool. Wall-to-wall carpeting. A dishwasher! I didn’t use the dishwasher the first year I lived there. I was not accustomed to such luxury.

As I vacuumed, I studied the dimples in the carpet. Memories flooded in. There sat the love seat, where I sobbed when it finally sank in that Dad was dying. I lay on that love seat one night, praying for the telephone to ring as I died of a broken heart.

The sliding glass door still bore faint imprints of masking tape I used when Opal smashed ashore in October 1995. The upstairs toilet had a padded seat with a small tear from the cats using the toilet as a drinking fountain. I owned a set of barbells that left trenches in the carpet. One night, Chris and I lay next to those barbells and oohed and ahhhed as an electrical storm fizzled and popped outside.

My cats lived their entire lives at that townhouse and today as I cleaned I found a spot where Pavlov threw up when he was so sick he’d retired to a spot behind the TV, waiting for death.

I remember coming home on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, exhausted and horrified, and turning on HGTV because I could not stand to watch another building explode. I remember coming home one night in 1993 and finding a letter in the mailbox from Bantam Books, what I thought was a rejection of my story “The Googleplex Comes and Goes.” It was not a rejection. It was an acceptance. And after I finished whooping and hollering, I got in the car, drove to Whataburger, bought a chocolate milkshake, and drove around town at 1 in the morning, chair dancing to the radio and basking in a glow of relief and satisfaction. It was my first professional sale.

The townhouse was my shelter, my refuge. I stayed there during the awful days and nights of Opal and Ivan. I was there when the economy tanked in 2007, and when the 1990s became the 2000s and nobody knew what to call them. I moved to the townhouse when I was 35 and moved out when I was 59. You can’t live in a place for 24 years without some of it rubbing off on you, and some of you rubbing off on it.

I am not the same person I was in 1990. I hope I am better – smarter, wiser, more patient. But who knows?

As I vacuumed, I spotted something lying on the carpet. A cat claw. The cats, they were always chewing their nails. Maggie died in 2005. Pavlov in 2009. Yet here, on this day in 2015, I found something they left behind, a little piece of DNA that would mean nothing to nobody but me.

I finished cleaning the oven. I put the cleaning materials in the car, and cinched up the ties on a plastic bag of garbage for the long walk to the Dumpster. I was finished.

As I headed for the front door for the last time, I stopped in the hallway and looked back to the living room. I said, “Well, goodbye little house. I sure did love you. I sure did.”

And then I went outside, locked the door, and left.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .