Jupiter Ascending is kind of a mess. Dropped plot threads, shaky worldbuiding, leaden dialogue, and fight scenes so frantic it's hard to tell which side you should be cheering for. And yet. And yet...!
It was described to me as being A Sci-Fi Film For Girls and it really, really is. Even through that lens, it's not perfect; the film may be named after Mila Kunis' Jupiter but Channing Tatum's Caine gets more development, more fellating by other characters (seriously so much fellating) and the end sequence is Caine having cool fights and flying cool planes as Jupiter, you know, runs down some hallways and stuff. But the female gaze is super strong and it's all kind of cheesy fun, except not quite as cheesy as I want it to be -- it'd work a lot better if it felt as though everyone involved was approaching this as a light-hearted romp and not giving speeches like they're in a high school drama club. Remember how Joss Whedon mocked Halle Berry's "You know what happens when a toad gets hit by lightning?" line reading in X-Men? The entire film is like that line, personified.
I've never found Channing Tatum particularly attractive, but let's just say he's doing it for me here. (Really doing it for me here.) There's nothing like a shirtless, eyelinered, pointy-eared man caressing some futuristic weapons as he soaks in his manpain.
Yes, pointy-eared because Caine is half-man, half-wolf. And also half-albino for reasons that are never explained. Nor do they explain what "half-albino" actually means, though if I were going to take a stab at it, I'm guessing that in the sequel (which presumably won't happen now the movie is flopping), it turns out the other half-men, half-wolves have dark skin. Why does that matter? Who knows! Apparently the original cut was three and a half hours long. I hope they release it on dvd so we can find out the answers to the 90% of the questions the movie asks and never answers because it'd rather show us another ten-minute fight sequence instead.
...and yet ever since I saw it a few days ago, I've become slightly obsessed. Here, have some links!
Jupiter Ascending is the Sci-Fi Movie Women Were Waiting For
(Donna Dickens at HitFix)
Here's The Thing About Jupiter Ascending
(Rave Sashayed on Tumblr)
Both of which get what so many mainstream critics did not: this is not necessarily a film for you, dudes.
Movie Yelling with Mallory and Shrill: Jupiter Ascending
(Mallory Ortberg at The Toast)
Long and a bit hard to read the way it's formatted, but it discusses many of the same issues I had with the film, and also one thing I hadn't considered: the film's weird relationship with homosexuality. Like a lot of films these days, it acknowledges the inherent homoeroticism in hyper-masculine men doing hyper-masculine things (Sean Bean's daughter calls Sean and Channing beating each other up their "mating ritual") and yet there's literally ten seconds of LGBT content in the entire film when a prissy helper droid who's been coded as gay in a way that's not offensive, but isn't exactly modern, throws shade at another gay-coded prissy helper droid. And that's it. Just as I'm surprised when female filmmakers create films with little feminist content, I'm surprised a trans filmmaker would make a film that presents every character as cis and every sexual encounter as hetero. Even the floaty space orgy is one guy and a bunch of girls.
Jupiter Ascending
(Abigail Nassbaum at Asking The Wrong Questions)
A long discussion of relationship between this and The Wachowski's best-known film, The Matrix, and why Jupiter Ascending isn't as good. I frequently love Abigail Nassbaum's writing and agree with just about everything she says here.
Brilliant recap of the film in dialogue form.
(Skygiants on Dreamwidth)
And there's fic, my friends! Fic with more twisted relationships than you can poke a stick at, and also way better dialogue. Recs to come when I've finished working though Ao3.
One to start:
Sirius Ascending by Aeolian
(Jupiter/Caine)
Billed as The post-credit scene you can't take your kids to see and indeed it is; this is what I walked out of the cinema wanting.
(Although it does have unexpected knotting, a kink I've never really gotten. It makes sense in this context, and it's very briefly mentioned, but, yeah.)
I'm now writing my own JA story and I find myself thinking about it from the other side, like maybe the hookers at the brothel your Legion-brothers take you to give you side-eye because nobody wants to have to deal with an hour of that. In other words, I find myself having Questions About Knotting (Fictitious Half-Human Half-Wolf Style), and it's not really something I can look up on Wikipedia.