Jupiter Ascending

[Cray]

This movie was a missed opportunity for a good sci-fi film. If they had avoided the pandering to the "young adult" crowd (i.e., 10-12 year old boys), it might've great. Still could've been a stinker, but the opportunities for success would've been broader without Channing Tatum skating through the sky on grav boots at the drop of a hat. Yay, kewl d00d, roller blades in the sky!

Anyway...

Jupiter Ascending is a Cinderella story (or maybe Anastasia story) about Mila Kunis, an immigrant girl who makes a living with her Russian mom and aunt cleaning the toilets of Chicago's rich and famous. She doesn't know it, but she also happens to be a space queen and her potential to inherit entire planets, like Earth, sets in motion assassination and marriage plots by her unknown family of space nobles.

The movie puts a lot of work into the sets, costumes, scenery, and background to produce a universe as rich and baroque as that of the original Dune movie. Bladerunner also came to mind just for the effort put into the background and little details. Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum pull their weight as actors, given the limits of the script.

The setting had potential. You've got nobles who are thousands of years old sitting at the peak of interstellar industries to harvest planets of biological resources (people). Earth hasn't been harvested in a long time and is worth a fortune. Genetics and genetic engineering is a big deal, almost a religion. I was thinking of Orions Arm "houses" in the movie.

The universe isn't all about nobles and their houses. There are space cops who might (or might not) have the potential to arrest nobles. There's a huge bureaucracy handled in a montage that's informative and amusing. The movie doesn't pause to explain matters in detail; it comes close to respecting the viewers' intelligence in that you follow or get lost.

Then the movie gets Jar-Jar'd by having Tatum skate around in grav boots any chance he can get. The fight scenes are almost unwatchable because the camera won't hold still, but that'd be more forgivable if they were aimed at a more mature audience.

I'm probably going to buy the movie just to milk it for RPG material. I'll skip the fight scenes.

[terrafamilia]

This movie was a missed opportunity for a good sci-fi film. If they had avoided the pandering to the "young adult" crowd (i.e., 10-12 year old boys), it might've great. Still could've been a stinker, but the opportunities for success would've been broader without Channing Tatum skating through the sky on grav boots at the drop of a hat. Yay, kewl d00d, roller blades in the sky!

I went mainly for the hardware, which was pretty sweet. I loved that one of the uber-wealthy antagonists had chandeliers in the docking bay of his colossal space-yacht.

Ciao,

Terrafamilia

[Drashner1]

The gravity skates didn't really bother me - on the 'good' side, it was a break from the 'let's do yet another version of whatever the popular SF trope of the year is' syndrome that is endemic to Hollywood. And the ships and tech (with all the free flying bits) were pretty cool.

On the bad side, the plot was such that I really couldn't work up the energy to care (and I'm usually incredibly forgiving of nearly any SciFi film's quirks and weak bits). Sure, the fate of the whole (Earth living) human race was theoretically hanging in the balance, but the way things were presented, that was almost treated as a throwaway line. The main theme that was on display here was 'a soap opera in space, with occasional fight scenes'.

Meh.

Todd

[Cray]

I went mainly for the hardware, which was pretty sweet. I loved that one of the uber-wealthy antagonists had chandeliers in the docking bay of his colossal space-yacht.

Agreed. Visuals like that are why I'm thinking of buying the movie. It was fascinating to see what the ultra-wealthy could accomplish when "ultra wealthy" is defined on the scale of an inhabited galaxy.

[PortalHunter]

It had potential, that's for sure. The story and characters could have been... better. But there's a lot of material in the movie that I really liked the looks of. One example are the emergency space suits in the execution sequence. They also acknowledged the fact that people don't die of oxygen deprivation but of carbon dioxide poisoning. I also wanted to see more of the dragon dudes. I was hoping for more fantastic creatures...

[Deleted User]

I went mainly for the hardware, which was pretty sweet. I loved that one of the uber-wealthy antagonists had chandeliers in the docking bay of his colossal space-yacht.

Agreed. Visuals like that are why I'm thinking of buying the movie. It was fascinating to see what the ultra-wealthy could accomplish when "ultra wealthy" is defined on the scale of an inhabited galaxy.

Could that element of the story be added into OA?

[Cray]

Agreed. Visuals like that are why I'm thinking of buying the movie. It was fascinating to see what the ultra-wealthy could accomplish when "ultra wealthy" is defined on the scale of an inhabited galaxy.

Could that element of the story be added into OA?

It's already present in every article of "someone personally engineers a planet/star system/super habitat starting with a Pocketboy nanofab." For example, The Pentagon Moons. There are many demonstrations of the incredible material wealth of terragens society in OA.