Film reviews: Jupiter Ascending | Love is Strange

Director: Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski

Running time: 127 minutes

Star rating: **

‘I JUST want to know what the hell is going on!” cries galactic space heroine Jupiter Jones. From your lips to the Wachowski siblings’ ears, because their new film is frequently baffling, and not in the rather cerebral way of Cloud Atlas. Jupiter Ascending vibrates like an episode of Star Wars retold by a teenager on Red Bull, a cacophony of nonsense that peaks with poor Sean Bean telling us that “bees are genetically designed to recognise royalty”.

Bees’ agents, however, are not programmed to recognise turkeys: just as their clients had finally recovered from that movie with Michael Caine, they are thrust into supporting Channing Tatum as a super-soldier whose DNA is part man and part wolf, which means a dinky pair of pointy ears, and a snarl when displeased. He also goes around shirtless quite unnecessarily, suggesting another gene-splice with Matthew McConaughey.

There’s a lot of gene-chopping in Jupiter Ascending: outer space looks like a thousand heavy metal covers diced together, and the heroine is a blend of a bored Mila Kunis, Cinderella, and Neo from the Wachowskis’ most successful film, The Matrix.

Like Neo, Chicago cleaner Jupiter has a striking name, a dead end job, and is unaware that she has a higher calling than scrubbing out toilets and fending off her large, annoying extended family.

Meanwhile, out in a solar system borrowed from Ming the Merciless, another family is taking an interest in her. The Abrasax are a warring set of alien siblings who have identified Jupiter as the unwitting incarnation of their mother, the Queen of the Universe. As befits royalty, all three are snotty, have British accents, and are a bit camp – especially Balem (Eddie Redmayne in an Oscar-annihilating performance), who likes to order around his dinosaur henchmen in a withered hoarse voice that suggests a planetary shortage of Strepsils. They are also pretty keen to bump off Jupiter before she can reclaim her throne and stop them accessing a youth serum which prolongs their lives and seems to be made from the same material as Soylent Green.

Wachowski movies are always elaborate to the point of fussiness, with action sequences that never know when to quit. The latest refinement is action-falling: Jupiter does it a lot here, mostly so Channing can race around in a pair of jetboots and catch her in his manly arms. At times like these, you long for the bracing gender assertiveness of an Anne Hathaway romcom.

However, amongst all this begging, stealing and borrowing from other films, there is one sequence I rather liked: a digression into alien bureaucracy where a patient robot diligently steers its charges through a zillion different departments and their petty distinctions, and just when you start thinking “this is all a bit Brazil”, up pops Terry Gilliam in a cameo. The blatant self-indulgence of this Wachowskis hat tip made me laugh.

Jupiter Ascending is the second film the Wachowskis have made since Larry Wachowski became Lana, which gives the movie’s theme of buried genetic coding a kind of force. Of course you don’t need to know about Lana’s transsexuality to watch Jupiter Ascending, but it gives this rather silly film a bit of heft if you do.

• On general release