Jupiter Ascending

Jupiter Ascending could have been better.

It's like they're trying to condense three to four hours worth of material into a 127 minute film, and the resulting action suffers from athletic overexposure.

Everything happens too quickly.

Because they cover so much ground, they're constantly placing characters in new hyper-reactive scenarios, and rather than taking the time to calmly build-up tension while diversifying character, bam, another battle begins, whether it's physical, bureaucratic, or conjugal, and it's like the fighting never stops, yet there's no sense that something could go wrong.

Spoilers.

Okay, the film points out how millions of people, in this case entire planets, can be exploited to increase the riches of a few, in this case a plan is in place to harvest humans to create an expensive highly coveted youth serum that prolongs life indefinitely, but the film also naturalizes royalty, which indirectly suggests that royals should have access to benefits denied to their subjects, like a youth serum for instance, even if the royal in question doesn't want to have anything to do with them/it.

The bee scene is one of Jupiter Ascending's coolest moments, but it doesn't fit well with the film's ethics.

And in the end Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) doesn't try to use her new position to break up the intergalactic obsession with the serum, she just goes back to her old life, chillin' with the fam and new partner Caine Wise (Channing Tatum).

Who are also both cool.

It's fun watching Caine fly around on his jet boots, like he's figure skating through time and space, but he does it so often there's a cloying affect, which significantly decreases the cool factor.

The fights he's in are usually full of people hired to do things which involve firing weapons, who obviously never learned how to shoot them.

Also, when Jupiter confronts arch-rival Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne) in the end, his dominion disintegrates far too quickly.

Here's one of the wealthiest people in the universe, and his defence grid seems like it's made out of lego.

A lot of corny dialogue.

Love the Wachowskis, but not Jupiter Ascending.

Cloud Atlas

Reincarnating a diverse sense of individualistic multiplicity, wherein manifold acts see their transhistorical countenances ambiently 'serialized,' as circumstances determine varying degrees of personal expedients and collective commitments, the most powerful of which are preconditioned by love eternal, of the other, an ideal, Cloud Atlas draws poetic intertemporal parallels amongst 'distinct' narratives to progressively decentralize teleological discourses without sacrificing their forward thinking critical cores, thereby generating a hardwired interdisciplinary mutlivaliant transistor.

As history comes to life.

It's as if the process of taking forms with myriad malleable landscapes and inter'connected' representational layers and populating them with breathing socio-political contents is itself materially manifested, through a vivacious, ethical engagement.

It doesn't shy away from using science-fiction to situate the cannibalistic nature of shortsighted grossly counterproductive characterizations of workers as one-dimensional subservient automatons being sinisterly force fed their own collectively suicidal divisive tropes in the present, from suggesting that aesthetic realms beyond our current epistemological methods of comprehension can be artistically realized (through music), from attaching an everlasting quality to the bucolic/urban dialectic, from elevating humanistic strategies for combatting the pervasive influence of unfettered capital, or intimating the ways in which capital can profit from events which never had to take place.

At the same time, it's not that serious.

Didn't like the whole inevitability dimension, but still, there's enough diegetic material here to create/continue the development of its own subgenre and it reminded me of Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, and Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry.

And Keith David's characters have great responses to the role he played in Crash(2004).