Byte-Sized Overview
Jupiter Jones spends her days cleaning wealthy homes and wondering why her life feels so much smaller than the universe she dreamed about as a child. Her routine ends when genetically engineered assassins attack her and Caine Wise, a former interplanetary soldier, arrives to keep her alive.
Jupiter learns that Earth is not an independent world but an immensely valuable property owned by the Abrasax dynasty. More importantly, her genetic identity gives her a stronger legal claim to the planet than any of the dynasty’s surviving heirs.
Written and directed by the Wachowskis, Jupiter Ascending combines fairy-tale romance, dynastic intrigue and spectacular space opera with a surprisingly vicious idea about capitalism taken to its final interplanetary form. The storytelling is overcrowded and frequently bewildering, but the film’s ambition, design and complete lack of embarrassment about its own strangeness make it difficult to dismiss.
Jupiter Ascending
Release Year: 2015
Director: Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski
Starring: Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth, Tuppence Middleton, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Nikki Amuka-Bird
Runtime: 127 minutes
Country: United States, Australia
Language: English
Production Company: Village Roadshow Pictures, RatPac-Dune Entertainment, Anarchos Productions
Subgenre Tags: Space Opera, Genetic Engineering, Interplanetary Empire, Alien Royalty, Science Fiction Romance
Why Jupiter Ascending Is Worth Watching
Few modern science-fiction films have failed as extravagantly or as interestingly as Jupiter Ascending. The Wachowskis were given an enormous budget to create an original space opera, and they used it to construct a universe filled with immortal dynasties, human-animal hybrids, gravity-manipulating boots, flying reptilian soldiers and government offices capable of making galactic royalty wait for the correct paperwork.
The result is excessive, uneven and often overwhelmed by the amount of mythology it attempts to explain. It is also unmistakably the work of filmmakers trying to create something rather than extend an existing franchise.
At the centre of the story is Jupiter Jones, a young woman whose daily life consists of cleaning toilets and enduring the arguments of her extended family. Her discovery that she is genetically identical to a dead interplanetary matriarch places her inside a familiar fantasy structure: the apparently ordinary woman who learns that she is secretly important.
The film complicates that fantasy by making Jupiter’s inheritance primarily legal and economic. She has not acquired magical powers or military training. She has become the owner of Earth, a planet valued because its population can eventually be processed into a substance that prolongs the lives of the wealthy.
That idea gives the film a much darker foundation than its romantic presentation initially suggests. The Abrasax family treats inhabited planets as agricultural holdings. Civilisations are allowed to develop until their populations reach the optimum level, after which everyone is harvested and transformed into a luxury product.
The scale of the exploitation is horrifying, but its administration is deliberately mundane. Ownership is documented, inheritances are disputed and planetary extermination is discussed as an asset-management decision. The villains are not trying to destroy Earth through anger. They intend to liquidate it because the population has become sufficiently profitable.
Mila Kunis gives Jupiter an accessible warmth, although the screenplay frequently reduces her to being abducted, rescued and transported between people who want to manipulate her. Channing Tatum approaches Caine Wise with absolute commitment, despite playing a wingless human-wolf hybrid who travels through the air on gravity boots.
Eddie Redmayne makes an entirely different performance choice as Balem Abrasax, delivering much of his dialogue in a wounded whisper before suddenly exploding into a roar. It is difficult to decide whether the performance is hypnotic, disastrous or both at once. The safest conclusion is that nobody else has ever played a galactic property magnate quite like him.
The film does not successfully organise all its ideas, but it contains more invention in a single sequence than many franchises manage across several instalments. Its visual ambition, political anger and unapologetic romanticism have helped it attract a more sympathetic audience since its disappointing original release.
Deep Dive Highlights
- An original space-opera universe: The film introduces competing dynasties, alien bureaucracies, engineered species and ancient economic systems without relying upon an established franchise.
- Earth as private property: Humanity’s home is revealed to be an asset owned by an interplanetary family. The population’s understanding of civilisation is irrelevant to the people holding the title deeds.
- The Abrasax dynasty: Balem, Kalique and Titus present different forms of manipulation. Each sibling attempts to control Jupiter while pretending to protect her from the others.
- Caine Wise: Channing Tatum commits completely to a character who is part human, part wolf and formerly winged. His gravity boots produce some of the film’s most distinctive action sequences.
- The Chicago pursuit: Caine’s first rescue of Jupiter combines aerial movement, alien spacecraft and collapsing architecture in an extended display of visual-effects choreography.
- Stinger Apini: Sean Bean brings reliable authority to a former soldier genetically combined with bee characteristics. The bees’ recognition of Jupiter’s royal status is both completely ridiculous and strangely charming.
- The bureaucracy of Orous: Jupiter’s attempt to confirm her inheritance becomes a journey through queues, forms, departments and contradictory instructions. Even galactic royalty cannot defeat administrative procedure without the correct stamp.
- The Abrasax refinery: Balem’s colossal industrial complex inside Jupiter provides an appropriately enormous setting for the climax. Its beauty disguises machinery built to process entire planetary populations.
- Michael Giacchino’s score: The music supplies grandeur, romance and momentum, often helping the film move through explanations that might otherwise bring it to a complete orbital stop.
- The production design: Costumes, spacecraft and interiors combine baroque royalty with advanced technology. The film’s visual world remains memorable even when the plot explaining it becomes difficult to follow.
Spoiler Mode
Jupiter Jones was born after the death of her father, Maximilian, an astronomer killed during a robbery in Russia. Her mother Aleksa moves the family to Chicago, where Jupiter grows up working alongside her relatives as a cleaner.
Jupiter wants to buy a telescope similar to the one owned by her father. Her cousin Vlad persuades her to sell her eggs, promising to divide the payment with her. At the clinic, the medical staff are revealed to be alien agents sent to kill her.
Caine Wise arrives and rescues Jupiter. He is a genetically engineered former soldier whose DNA combines human and wolf characteristics. Caine uses gravity boots that allow him to skate through the air by manipulating gravitational forces.
After another attack, Caine takes Jupiter to the home of Stinger Apini, a former colleague living outside Chicago. Stinger is a human-bee hybrid, and the bees surrounding his home immediately recognise Jupiter as royalty.
Jupiter learns that humans did not originate on Earth. Humanity was seeded across numerous planets by an ancient interplanetary civilisation. Earth is one of many inhabited worlds owned by the House of Abrasax, a powerful dynasty whose members have lived for thousands of years.
The Abrasax family maintains its longevity through a substance called Regenex. This restorative product is created by harvesting human populations and processing their bodies. One container requires the lives of approximately one hundred people.
Earth’s population is approaching the point at which the planet can be harvested.
The former owner of Earth was Seraphi Abrasax, matriarch of the dynasty and mother of Balem, Kalique and Titus. Jupiter is a genetic recurrence of Seraphi, meaning that her DNA is effectively identical to the dead woman’s.
Under interplanetary law, Jupiter is entitled to inherit Seraphi’s possessions, including Earth. Her existence therefore threatens the Abrasax siblings and their competing claims.
Kalique brings Jupiter to her estate and presents herself as a friendly ally. She explains the process of regeneration by entering a restorative bath and emerging physically younger. Kalique encourages Jupiter to claim her inheritance, although her apparent kindness is another attempt to gain control over Earth.
Jupiter travels to the administrative world of Orous to have her identity recognised. The process requires visits to numerous departments and an apparently endless sequence of forms. Eventually, she receives the seal confirming her status as Seraphi’s recurrence and legal owner of Earth.
Titus Abrasax then approaches Jupiter. He claims that Balem murdered Seraphi and intends to harvest Earth. Titus proposes marriage, arguing that their union will protect Jupiter and prevent Balem from taking the planet.
Caine discovers that Titus intends to kill Jupiter after the marriage and inherit Earth through her. He disrupts the ceremony and escapes with her.
Titus’s betrayal does not make Balem the safer choice.
Balem abducts Jupiter’s family and takes them to his refinery inside the planet Jupiter. He offers to release them if Jupiter signs ownership of Earth back to him. Without her consent, Balem cannot legally begin the harvest.
Jupiter initially prepares to sign, but Balem reveals how little value he places upon individual lives. She realises that surrendering Earth would save her family temporarily while condemning its entire population.
She refuses.
Balem attempts to kill Jupiter, but Caine arrives after regaining the mechanical wings removed as punishment for an earlier offence. He fights through Balem’s forces while the refinery begins to collapse.
Jupiter confronts Balem and learns that he killed Seraphi. His mother became disturbed by the harvesting system and considered ending the family’s participation in it. Balem murdered her to protect the dynasty and its wealth.
During their confrontation, part of the refinery collapses. Balem falls to his death, while Caine rescues Jupiter before the facility is destroyed.
Jupiter’s family is returned safely to Earth, but their memories of the events are erased. They continue believing that Jupiter’s disappearance resulted from a relatively ordinary family crisis.
Jupiter resumes her work as a cleaner. She now legally owns Earth, although most of its population remains unaware of the interplanetary civilisation surrounding it.
Caine’s status is restored, and he is granted a new pair of wings. Jupiter and Caine begin a relationship, spending time together by flying above Chicago on his gravity boots.
Jupiter has inherited an entire planet but returns to her former life with a different understanding of its value. Cleaning houses may still be tedious, but it becomes slightly easier to tolerate when one secretly owns the world containing them.
Core Question
Can a civilisation call itself advanced when its prosperity depends upon treating other people as a resource?
The Abrasax dynasty possesses technology capable of manipulating gravity, creating new species and restoring youth. Its members travel between planets and measure their lives in millennia. By almost any technological standard, their civilisation is extraordinarily advanced.
Morally, however, it is built upon industrialised slaughter.
The family avoids confronting the human cost by treating inhabited planets as properties and their populations as crops. Legal ownership transforms murder into harvesting, while commercial language allows entire civilisations to be discussed as investments.
Earth’s inhabitants are considered valuable only collectively. Their cultures, relationships and individual lives have no significance to the people waiting for the population to reach a profitable level.
Balem argues that time is the most valuable commodity in the universe. Regenex allows those with sufficient wealth to purchase more of it, but every additional year enjoyed by the Abrasax family is created by removing years from countless others.
Jupiter’s importance initially appears to come from her genetic connection to Seraphi. Her true significance emerges when she rejects the values attached to that inheritance. She refuses to exchange billions of lives for the safety of her own family, even when Balem places them directly in danger.
The film presents technological progress without ethical progress as another form of barbarism. A civilisation does not become enlightened merely because its exploitation occurs on a planetary scale and arrives with impressive paperwork.
Watch If You Like
- The Fifth Element: An apparently ordinary woman becomes central to a colourful galactic conflict filled with strange aliens, elaborate costumes and extravagant production design.
- Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: Two agents travel through a visually overwhelming interstellar civilisation while uncovering a concealed act of mass destruction.
- John Carter: A human outsider is transported into a complex planetary conflict involving unfamiliar cultures, advanced technology and dynastic politics.
- Dune: Competing noble houses fight for control of an immensely valuable planet within a feudal interstellar empire.
- Guardians of the Galaxy: A mismatched collection of aliens and human outsiders confronts a threat capable of destroying an entire world.
- Alita: Battle Angel: A young woman discovers that her identity connects her to a much larger conflict within a visually ambitious science-fiction world.
- Cloud Atlas: The Wachowskis connect lives across different periods through an ambitious story about power, exploitation and resistance.
- The Matrix: An apparently ordinary life is revealed to exist inside a hidden system designed to exploit humanity on an unimaginable scale.
Signal Strength
IMDb users currently rate Jupiter Ascending 5.3/10, while Rotten Tomatoes reports a 28% Tomatometer score and a 38% Popcornmeter audience score.
The film was widely criticised for its dense exposition, uneven dialogue and inability to organise its enormous collection of ideas into a coherent story. Jupiter spends much of the narrative being transported, deceived or rescued, while the Abrasax mythology arrives faster than the film can properly explore it.
Its reputation has improved among viewers who value its originality and extravagant commitment. The film’s political ideas, visual imagination and refusal to resemble an ordinary franchise production have encouraged a modest cult following.
Zombie Head’s Take: Jupiter Ascending is chaotic, overfilled and sometimes appears to be explaining three different films simultaneously. It is also gloriously sincere, visually distinctive and built around a genuinely nasty idea about wealth consuming human life. Mila Kunis deserves more control over her own story, but gravity boots, bee aristocrats and Eddie Redmayne whispering about planetary ownership provide pleasures unavailable almost anywhere else. It is not a successful film in the conventional sense, but convention was never invited aboard.
Zombie Head's independent editorial rating A spectacularly uneven space opera whose imagination and sincerity make its failures considerably more interesting than most successes.Zombie Head's Score
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