The movie starts out with our main character’s parents meeting in Russia. Her father, a guy who seems to be a professor of looking through telescopes, and mother, also a professor, meet-cute on the banks of a river in Russia. We flash forward: mom is pregnant and a bunch of mobsters or communists or robbers or something burst in and start robbing them and he dies trying to save his precious telescope. He really loves telescopes. Mom skips town and gives birth in a shipping container. Gross.

Now we’re in space! On some planet where everyone has clearly been murdered. Eddie Redmayne and some people too pretty to not be evil call it “harvesting” and talk about galactic real estate and their dead mom. Redmayne can only muster a whisper, for some reason, a thing he does the entire movie.



Ok! We’re back on earth, in Chicago. You see the everyday life of Mila Kunis’ Jupiter Jones, who seems to have a job as a toilet cleaner with her aunt and mother- who I suppose left her math doctorate in the shipping container.

We see some people on a rooftop watch Channing Tatum, in Spock ears, walk through a wall. They whisper excitedly to each other about his boots. The wall he’s walked through is some medical clinic, and he figures out a lot of stuff by smelling pieces of paper. This is not the last time in the movie people figure something out by smelling it. I haven’t been working out my nose enough, it appears.



The people on the roof attack Channing, who turns on his boots because it turns out they are JET BOOTS. He basically speed-skates through the sky to get the hell out of there. I write “JET BOOTS!!!” in my notebook. Don’t worry about seeing the jet boots, because he uses the jet boots about 25 times in this thing. Jet boots.

The entire film (artist’s rendition)

Now, we’re on another planet that looks exactly like the elf city from Lord of the Rings. One of the evil siblings from before talks to a guy named MALEDICTES, who definitely isn’t also evil. The character names in this movie are top-notch.



So it turns out Channing Tatum was at the clinic because Mila Kunis is involved in some weirdo subplot about selling her eggs to get her cousin money, and she’s freaked out about her eggs being “harvested.” Later in the movie, it appears the universe’s one percenters take baths in stem cells made from “harvested” people to remain young forever. So remember: egg donation = genocide.

Mila is gonna use her egg money to buy a telescope. People are just nuts for telescopes in this flick.

So back on Jupiter, (the planet) Whisperin’ Eddie Redmayne tells his army of dragon men that Jupiter (the person) has to die. But just before a team of aliens pretending to be doctors can dispatch her, Channing Tatums pops in out of nowhere and rescues her. He flies off into the night again with his jet boots (jet boots!) holding Mila in his arms, one of many times he will do this.

Before they can get off the planet, Caine (Channing Tatum) and Jupiter get attacked by what look like a bunch of flying crawdads. Chicago gets destroyed. Sorry, Chicago!



They go to Sean Bean’s house, which is covered in bees. The bees love Mila! He’s not from Earth but has been banished to rural Illinois because Channing Tatum bit a guy once (natch). He says these words with a straight face: “Bees aren’t like humans. Bees don’t lie.”

He tells Mila Kunis she’s queen of space. It’s never quite specified what she’s queen of, but it appears to be the entirety of space. We also find out that Channing Tatum has Spock ears because he’s some sort of space werewolf, and does not have a pack. Bear with me here. He’s a … lone… wolf. Get it? Nice. He and Sean Bean are on a mission… to earn their wings. Literal wings. For flying.

They all get attacked and Jupiter is captured despite commanding a bee army. Channing Tatum doesn’t have a shirt on for an extremely long time, including an intergalactic flight. Jupiter finds out that she’s a genetic duplicate (but not a clone?) of the last queen of space, who was mysteriously murdered and the evil siblings are somehow her 40,000 year-old children. After another chase and a lot more shooting, Mr. Tatum whisks Jupiter off to BUREAUCRACY PLANET where they spend far too much time waiting on lines, and spend some more time talking about galactic real estate law. Jupiter tells Dog-Tatum that she loves dogs in a way that also reads as “I want to fuck,” which is a pretty deft line-reading if you ask me.



Jupiter is whisked away AGAIN by another one of her evil kids who explains to her why humans exist on Earth and it’s very Matrix-y. At this point, we are firmly in the Wachowski Bonkers Nonsense Zone: There’s more double-crosses, plot twists, incest weddings, a billion year-old society that doesn’t understand Nature vs. Nurture, and some remedial capitalism criticism. Wolfman Channing has to crash a spaceship to stop Jupiter from, uh, signing documents — not once, but twice.

The best thing about Jupiter Ascending is how it looks: the worlds are richly imagined and filled out with all sorts of great little details. Don’t believe the un-hype: It’s a doofy campfest but it seems to know it for the most part. It avoids being boring when it could have easily been considering it’s a space opera featuring a montage of people waiting on line at the space DMV.

Come for a man piloting a baroque starship from inside a bathtub, stay for Channing Tatum in elf ears murdering a bunch of guys with guns for arms in luchador masks.