CREDIT: WARNER BROS. PICTURES
It's not the Wachowskis', Mila Kunis', Channing Tatum's or Eddie Redmayne's best work by any means - but the movie had potential.

Jupiter’s world is small and bleak, consisting of nothing more than herself, her mother, her extended family and a life of cleaning toilets just to have enough to eat. It’s a life she hates – as she says repeatedly – and her only wish is to be able to look among the stars.

Luckily for her, she’s secretly the genetic reincarnation of intergalactic royalty, with random control over bees and a loyal dog-man to save her from the bounty hunters that come to kill her.

As the newest movie from the Wachowski siblings, Jupiter Ascending is sadly more akin to the last two Matrix films than the first. It has abundant plot holes, an incomprehensible mix of amazing and terrible CG and fight scenes that are dragged out far beyond what any reasonable person would find interesting. The love story shoehorned into the plot leaves a lot to be desired, as Jupiter – played by Mila Kunis – insists that she hasn’t changed to the mostly-human wolf creation – Channing Tatum – she met mere hours ago.

For those not into bestiality, there is also a good amount of attempted incest as the children of the woman Jupiter is genetically identical to flirt with and propose to her.

While everyone around Jupiter represent some of the more disconcerting sexual kinks possible, Jupiter herself is also sadly naive and frustrating to watch. She goes from a miserable human being who spends all her time envying others instead of trying to change her life to a damsel in distress who falls from various heights more often than Mary-Jane Watson and Lois Lane combined. Every decision she makes is terrible, and her priorities make little sense.

Not only are the characters terrible, but the plot makes little sense. It’s implied that the entire reason for going after Jupiter is to gain control of the planet Earth, which is apparently valuable despite that each of the siblings own hundreds of planets that are more technologically advanced and more densely populated.

Also, it’s really unclear if these people are royalty or just amoral business tycoons, as they flip from being worshipped to being ruthlessly profit-minded, which – if they are royalty – they would have no need to be.

It can be said that Jupiter Ascending is at least visually interesting, although the quality of the CG and the green-screens is radically inconsistent. One scene will have beautifully rendered characters that look incredibly realistic, and the next will have cars that look less realistic than those in Grand Theft Auto IV. The bullet-time effect is only used as the action is already slowing down, and everyone always has their phasers set to stun.

While this movie is terrible, it’s sadly not terrible enough to still be enjoyable. Instead, the audience is made to watch a tribute to the writers’ repressed sexual desires as a bunch of amazing actors waste their talent on terrible dialogue and pointless scenes. While the concept had a lot of potential, the execution was far from stellar.