Jupiter Ascending

I didn't expect much, but I got more than enough. Fabulous sci-fi trash in the best sense of the word (in short, a full-fledged successor to 1980's Flash Gordon), set in an absolutely amazing world and almost constantly entertaining. Hand on heart, it's not much different from the much-vaunted Marvel movies. True, there could have been a little more perspective (crop circles and space bureaucrats with Terry Gilliam amused me immensely), but then Jupiter Ascending could also have turned into an awkward comedy, which the Wachowskis (after Speed Racer, thank God) clearly didn't intend. The action scenes are superbly engaging, the special effects are lavish, everything is nicely clear and understandable, but perhaps the most pleasing thing for me was Michael Giacchino's bombastic music and its judicious use, which makes it not really stick out from the film , but it is not simply neglected either. Four pure stars and I'll probably go to the cinema again (I'll put on Flash Gordon before that happens). (06/02/2015)

Too bad about the idiotic script and zero character motivation. The reason to watch the Wachowskis' films, besides the many clever ideas and often interesting innovations in various aspects, is the visuals, and unfortunately that's also the only thing that really works reliably here. But what to do when all those aesthetically intoxicating, almost bizarrely Victorian sets and worlds look so stunning and yet the film is such crap? Surprisingly, the Tatum & Kunis chemistry works above average but it’s cheesy. (25/10/2015)

For me, probably the guilty pleasure of the year. The film is aesthetically unattractive, with a leading villain that takes it all the way to 11 and a very incompetent casting. When Mila Kunis tries to look serious, it simply doesn’t work… but when she tries to drop one-liners, it’s almost painful. Only the core premise of planets as people factory-farms or fuel to keep the vitality of the galactic rulers had some potential, but this time the Wachowskis were unable to exploit it. On the other hand, I must confess that, in its own way, this crap was actually fun. (03/05/2015)

Oh, dear Lord, that was awful. My expectations were ultra low, but this outdid them all. It's basically the most miserable variation on a harlequin Shrek: everyone wants the princess, but true love awaits in the form of a muscular dog from a dingy alley who is to take her to them (which is actually fitting for a toilet cleaner), and she finds out over time (pretty quickly, actually) that there’s less than 100 people in the glittering can and that she's totally horny. The script is from the realm of the most hellish fantasies you can have, and I don't buy at all that this duo could ever create something like the legendary Matrix. The actors clearly suffer when they have to chew through ultimate lines like: "You don't understand what that means but... I have more in common with a dog than I have with you." - "I love dogs. I've always loved dogs." And I suffered with them, writhing on the floor in pain, I was begging and pleading! Even if I had a room all pink, saved all my teen magazines from my adolescent years, and was considering lip surgery, I still couldn't have swallowed this "romance" without assistive devices. If I turned the sound off, I'd get the impression that it was a sort of bombastic, action-packed fashion arena for Mila Kunis, if you can endure watching her sour face. I'm going to reboot my brain, douse myself in liquid oxygen and goodbye, hopefully forever. (01/03/2020)

Sometimes it's sad to see how a perfect-looking blockbuster can crumble into smaller and smaller pieces with each scene. What starts with the absurd scenes with the Russian family the script calmly continues with random scenes without no explanation of bizarre names, theories, and memories, and it absolutely triumphantly concludes with Eddie Redmayne in a perfectly annoying acting role in front of a pre-embalmed corpse that cannot produce a single comprehensible sentence. Lana and Lilly Wachowski should be glad that Channing Tatum smoothly switched to air skating, because without his aerial antics in the final fiery inferno, the rating would unquestionably drop into even more terrifying places. (05/02/2015)