What in the world went wrong here? I can’t even fathom how the same sibling team that wrote & directed The Matrix and also made the pretty brilliant Cloud Atlas came up with this. Jupiter Ascending is a disaster from the first frame.
The best way to describe the acting is that it’s just “off”… across the board. The film has a good cast who’ve all done great work in other places but not here. Mila Kunis comes out as one of the worst, horribly miscast and lacking any kind of charisma. She isn’t helped by a script that gave her character nothing to do except get saved by other characters. The absolute worst though is Eddie Redmayne who does some kind of strange whisper voice throughout (it sounds something like him when he played Hawking in the first stages of the disease). He overacts every scene, poses no threat on screen, and by the end, you can’t believe he did this in the same year that he won an Oscar for The Theory of Everything.
The heart of the problem lies in the script though. How do the Wachowski’s not know basic story telling techniques by now? Never… I mean NEVER… create a protagonist that is only acted upon and yet, that’s what they’ve done here. Jupiter goes from one crisis to the next, without making any choices that drive the plot and so as expected, you couldn’t care less about the character or the action or what was happening next.
On the plus side, the costume design, set design, unique ships, computer generated scenes, and space fights are really stellar. It appears the Wachowski’s spent all their time on the design and none with the actors and the story. For all the bad will that gets thrown at George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels, they are immensely better told stories than Jupiter Ascending. What a disappointment.