I am very surprised. Surprised that writers and directors don’t appear to pay any attention to the criticisms levelled at other poorly received genre films and so still fail to learn from those mistakes. But I guess ego’s often get in the way of an education. And that’s a pity.
First off Jupiter A is not a total disaster. Its not even terribly bad. What it is, most tragically of all, is a bit boring. And utterly predictable.
Before I get to that what I was impressed by once again was the excellent standard of effects .To render such a high level of often breathtaking scenes and beautiful environments (and I swear I saw the 2001 wheel space station in one background shot) and complete the sheer quantity of all the concept artwork from the props through to the spaceships and planets they must have employed entire legions of digital artists and techs!!! And though a good deal of it was new and interesting , just as much of it felt like it had been plucked from so many, many other sci fi movies (so much so at one early point I actually thought they’d landed on Naboo and nicked their costumes).
But as strong as all this production work was , it’s once again a great shame that its the weak and unconvincing script that really fails to stitch all of it together and its the characters and storyline that just simply and laughably feel like they deliberately raided some of the most feeble and least interesting elements often used in sci fi time and again over the decades.
It’s such a juvenile effort. As if they thought by copying whole chunks of Dune , the Fifth Element , Brazil ,Star Wars etc that they would have been able to successfully reproduce many of the grandiose ideas and themes of those stories. But they didn’t. Not by a mile. What they got was a great looking but pretty hollow reproduction. For an epic space opera it singularly failed to find its own voice because all the songs it sang came from other shows.
Instead of the spice we got the immortal "nectar" bath gel harvested from humans (so not "batteries" this time???). We had Roman style dynasties filled with evil scheming siblings,their fabulous space palaces patroled by their Flash Gordon gun armed guards, nasty flying monkey crocodiles , crop circles, creepy greys and memory erasures,speeder bikes and bounty hunters, and just about every other action film and sci fi cliché you could possibly think of chucked into the already overloaded mix. Including the speed skater gravity boots.
And neither the half wolf man hero who looked more like bare chested steroid pumped wrestling Elf and the remarkably “Stupider Jones” heroine who has all the intergalactic political insight of a concussed bee could save me from wondering how anyone could ever have doubted the out come at any point in the story.
If it wasn’t for the excellent effects work I’d have felt royally cheated by this. As it was I just felt a deep and profound disappointment and sadness that perhaps two or three or four really good films could have been produced for what was spent on this. I hope it does well in perhaps Russia and China where they may have been less exposed to the well trodden paths that many others films have explored before this one.
:behave
