Movie Review: Jupiter Ascending (2015) - Yeah it just crashes and burns.

This one is gonna bug the crap out of me. I was already worried when it got delayed from last year and now I can see why. I place the blame solely on Guardians of Galaxy, not because it was bad, but because it was so good I’m guessing Warner Bros. who funded the thing wanted the movie re-edited to try and compete with that instead of letting the film keep the clearly much bigger ambition it had in mind instead. This one smells of studio manipulation but first let’s get to the positives shall we?

Pros - The movie looks really cool, the set designs are amazing as well as some of the character designs. The action scenes are also really well done (they should be as they literally take up 85 - 90% of the movie.)

Cons - There’s no easy way to say this: This movie feels like a transformers movie, and I HATE THE TRANSFORMER MOVIES! However, I will say that this is a better looking and smarter Transformers movie, but it’s still basically a bunch of action scenes strung together by, in the case of Jupiter Ascending, what feels like a very heavily edited plot cut down to try and streamline it. Also Eddie Redmayne as the villain in this reminds me of Hayden Christensen in the Star Wars Prequels, and I HATE THE STAR WARS PREQUELS, SURPRISINGLY LESS THAN TRANSFORMERS, BUT STILL A GREAT DEAL! and yet despite all that, I will add an addendum to the final rating.

Final Score: 2/10 (Theatrical Version.)

From what I could scavenge off of the remaining story, there seemed like at one point to be a great amount of potential and some really big ideas in the original cut of the film. So the score for today only applies to the theatrical version, on the condition that if there is a Director’s Cut made of this film I’m gonna watch the shit out of that to see if they can salvage any of that potential.

Now I know the last time I posted I said I’d have five Retro Reviews coming up, I still do, but I plan to post those out on weeks when either nothing is playing or I’m too busy to go to the movies. But until then, I’ll see you folks at the movies.