For April Fools Day a Yes No Maybe So on a trailer promoting a movie that could well be a folly.
Though I am on record at having loathed Cloud Atlas I appreciate movies that operate from the outer edges of sanity. I'm always curious when the Wachowski Siblings make a movie despite a despairing qualitative free fall: their first was their best (Bound), their second their second best (The Matrix) but it's been a precipitous drop each and every time so at this rate they'll make the worst movie of all time soon. Will it be Jupiter Ascending?
I realized this trailer arrived a week ago but it's been busy chez moi. I made a wee bit of time today because... well, you'll have to see why in the Yes column after the jump.
YES
• Channing Tatum with Elf ears + Wet Eddie Redmayne = instant boner²
NO
• I don't understand one thing that is happening in any of those action clips and aint nobody got time for incoherent action sequences now that Captain America: Winter Soldier is about to arrive and seems to come from the Cameron school of well choreographed thoughtfully visualized battles in which you can often (if not always) follow what each character is doing even as they move at extraordinary athletic speed through extraordinary special effects and which is not dependent on disorienting editing for its thrills.
• This trailer gives the vibe that the movie is going to be quite a hodgepodge of 'yeah, let's put that onscreen, too!'
• Ugh, so Jupiter is some sort of queen, a one and only? Aint nobody got time for another Chosen One myth. That's all we ever get. I love Baby Jesus as much as anyone but it's like he ruined sci-fi/fantasy because everything is some sort of neo-christian salvation myth where only one person holds the destiny of all. Snoresville. Give me team work and multiple heroes any day over this ancient and tired trope.
• After Oz the Great and Powerful I fear all shots of Mila Kunis in gawdy costumes. She's one of those rare traditionally gorgeous actresses where low key costuming does more to accentuate her beauty. Everything else doesn't look right on her. Give me the simple tights and jackets of Black Swan any day.
MAYBE SO
• Bound was all kinds of amazing with the budget-free attributes of plotting and performance and editing and such and those filmmakers have to be somewhere in there buried in the CGI budgets they've been afforded ever since, right?
FINAL THOUGHT...
I really wish this were JUPITER HOLLOW ASCENDING and Bette Midler² & Lily Tomlin² were messing yo shit up in elf ears and jet pack shoes.
That's all I got when I'm looking at it. I'm a "No". But maybe you feel differently?