Starring: Milan Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne. Tuppence Middelton, and Douglas Booth
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 127 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2015
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This fantasy science fiction film tells the story of an interplanetary war that is threatened, when an unsuspecting young woman becomes the heir to future Earth. In its production, visual effects, and style of direction, it has strong links with the “The Matrix” series.
The original Matrix film, “The Matrix” (1999), and its two sequels, “The Matrix Reloaded” (2003) and “The Matrix Revolutions” (2003) were directed by the Wachowski brothers, Andy and Lana, who wrote and directed this movie. For them, the story of this movie was inspired partly by two widely diverse sources – Homer’s “Odyssey” and “The “Wizard of Oz”.
The film begins by showing us Jupiter Jones (Milan Kunis) working on Earth as a lowly janitor. She cleans toilets, avoids taking any responsibility, and mostly lives down-and-out with a family she loves. When an elf-eared, bounty-hunter, interplanetary warrior, Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), comes to Earth to find her, Caine confronts Jupiter with a special destiny.
On another planet, the matriarch of a powerful alien royalty has been murdered and her children, Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Kalique (Tuppence Middelton), and Titus (Douglas Booth) are fighting over what they believe is their rightful inheritance. They don’t trust each other and their dispute is threatening an intergalactic war. Caine convinces Jupiter that her genetic structure makes her the rightful heir to Earth, and that it identifies her clearly as royalty. Jupiter travels with Caine to the master planet to help put a stop to Balem’s tyrannical rule.
When Jupiter arrives, Balem puts a bounty on her head, and Caine protects her. Balem wants Earth for himself and would rather “harvest” and destroy it than lose it to Jupiter. Jupiter embraces her destiny when Caine tells her she is the only person who can prevent intergalactic war among the universe’s powerful dynasties. She wants to protect Earth, but she has also developed a special affection for Caine.
With the Matrix series behind them, the Wachowski Brothers, not surprisingly, have created a movie with very distinctive special effects. Its visual effects are anchored to rich detail, and lavish costuming and special set designs fill the screen. There are some extraordinary scenes that earmark the film as a movie that supplies highly distinctive and unusual visual spectacle. In the final moments of the movie, for example, a winged Caine folds his wings around Jupiter to embrace her.
The movie is a heady mixture of futuristic conversations between its characters, thoughts and reflections on sundry themes, battle scenes, and flights of quick-moving fantasy. As the movie develops, its various complex subplots interweave, and the film has to cope with the challenges of communicating universal intergalactic warfare, universal hopes and desires, science fiction thought-possibilities, and individual hopes and ambitions.
For light relief, the film contains some good comedy lines, but for the most part its special effects absorb the dramatic complexity of its story-line. In the film, Tatum and Kunis acquit themselves vey well, and there is a compelling contrast between the work of Eddie Redmayne, as Balem, and his extraordinary performance as Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything” (2014).
The film is a particularly inventive one, and operates at a high fantasy level. It is not all-absorbing science fiction in what it cognitively attempts to do, but it is very enjoyable and entertaining. The Matrix series achieved hallucinatory vividness for the Wachowski brothers, and this movie achieves the same end. Viewing this movie is like seeing a rich variety of visual hallucinations unfold. The talents of the Wachowski brothers are imaginatively and distinctively on show in this movie, and they are well worth experiencing.
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