Death Note (2006 Live-action Movie)

Before the animated series, before the animated movies, before Warner Bros picked up the rights to make an American movie, there were the live-action movies. I suppose I should have covered these before I dealt with the animated series, or the animated movies, but c'est la vie. I didn't actually find out that this movie was released before the animated series started until today, so that's kinda my fault for not looking this up. Oh well, we've come this far, we might as well keep going.
On June 17th of 2006, Warner Bros. Pictures Japan released Kaneko Shūsuke's live-action adaptation of  Ōba Tsugumi and Obata Takeshi's comic masterpiece, Death Note. For the uninitiated, Death Note is one of the greatest pieces of fiction in history, and easily one of the best comic-books ever created. See if you can find the trade-paperbacks at a bookstore or library near you, read all thirteen volumes, and then get back to me. Seriously, you will not regret it. You might want to space it out a bit though so it's not done all in a week. This is the kind of thing you don't want to rush through.
Now that everyone's finished reading the comics, let's talk about this film here. Strangely enough, for a movie based on a comic that was as critically acclaimed as Death Note, with over thirty million copies in circulation, scores of nominations and awards, millions of fans, and near-constant re-releases of literally everything related to the series, I can't actually find much about the films production. There's a little note about how this was the first movie to charter an underground rapid-transit line in all of Japanese cinematic history. Apparently, they also used over five-hundred extras in production too, which was definitely a good idea. It helped to populate background shots, and kept the movie from looking empty. Unfortunately, we're going to dig into some rather massive criticisms before the review is over, so sit tight. Spoilers for the comics, animated series, animated films, and of course this movie inbound. As this is a Japanese film, I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles. There's an English language track available, with most of the cast of the animated series English dub reprising their roles, but we'll get to that later on.
Chonologically speaking, this movie starts after Light Yagami (Played by Tatsuya Fujiwara) gets the Death Note, and after the Kira killings begin. In that regard, like many others, it's similar to Visions of a God. One could infer from that fact that the director of Visions of a God took some influence from Death Note, but I can't find any confirmation of that fact. You can tell however, that the Visions of a God director/editors stopped taking ideas from it almost immediately, since this movie starts out with a montage of Light killing criminals. From street-crime to murderers with connections, to corrupt politicians, we're shown their names being written down in the Death Note.
The Kira legend grows around the world, with some finding him a hero, and others considering him an outright criminal, no better than those he's killing. At this point, Kira is nothing more than an urban legend.
Meanwhile, at To-Oh University in Japan, Light is strolling through an incredibly chatty cafeteria with his girlfriend, Shiori Akino (Played by Kashii Yuu). Shiori serves all the same purposes as Yuri (I forgot her name and thought she was Takada originally) did in the comics and more. See, Shiori has a much larger role in this film than Yuri did. In fact, she has almost the same impact on the plot as Misa or Takada does.
Kaneko described Shiori as a character he created to contrast with Light. Her morals were intended to differ directly from both his, and L's. L has an almost amoral, ends justify the means attitude towards justice, while Light sees anyone who stands in his way as a target. Shiori is more of a means justify the ends kind of person (if that makes any sense), with a strict adherence to due process in mind at all times when it comes to justice.
She and Light discuss the urban legend of Kira, with him describing to her an encounter he had with a criminal, who bragged about murdering a kid to explain to her why he agrees with what Kira is doing. He leaves out the fact that he found the Death Note immediately afterwards.
He takes it home, and decides to test it out on a criminal involved in a hostage situation. Since the guy's already killed some hostages, I suppose he figures it won't hurt if he kills the guy.
Rather than following up on the instructions in the notebook, which say that the person whose name is written in the Death Note will die in forty seconds unless a time of death is written in, goes right to bed and finds out the guy died the next morning.
We then get to the train-crossing scene, which in the original was just Light crossing the railroad tracks, but here he sees the guy who was bragging about killing some kid earlier in the movie and he decides to pull out the Death Note, right then and there and write the guys name down.
He literally does that. In fact, he does it twice! Earlier in the film he pulled the notebook out of his bag and wrote down the name of someone else!
Let's think back to the comics, shall we? Yes, Light wrote down names in public, but he was never that brazen about it. He either used pages from the notebook, cuttings, or disguised the notebook with another book. He never took it out in public!

Then again, it's not like Light could easily hide something that freaking huge! Seriously, the Death Note in this movie is enormous! I'd reckon that it's more than twice the size it was in the comics and the animated series. I'd just like to remind everyone that Light hid the Death Note in a book that was about the size of the movie version in the comics with plenty of space to spare. You might notice other things in this screenshot worth noting, but we'll get to them later in the review.
Later on, Light meets Ryuk (Played by Nakamura Shidou), the Shinigami (Japanese for god of death) who dropped the Death Note in the human realm. Rather than asking him if he's here to take his soul, like he did in literally every other iteration of the franchise we've covered so far, Light asks him if he's here to take his life. I don't know if this was just some weirdo mistranslation for the movie or what. Could be the subtitles. Anyways, as any experienced fan would know, Ryuk says that he's just gonna follow him around for kicks. Sort of. Ryuk's motives aren't actually that well-explained in this film.
Interpol in general and the Japanese National Police Agency in particular are no closer to figuring out what's going on with the Kira killings, so they're about to toss it off to the public health agencies before the detective L (Played by Matsuyama Ken'ichi) steps in to point out that the killings absolutely cannot be natural causes, comparing it directly to death counts and patterns from actual diseases. This is rather anti-climactic, since they just tell us everything that happened at the ICPO rather than showing it to us. Here we're introduced to Watari (Played by Fujimura Shunji), L, and Soichiro Yagami. (Played by Kaga Takeshi)
L decides to confront Kira on television, using the Lind L. Tailor (Played by Matt Lagan) ruse. Light kills Tailor, and L brags about how easy it was for him to trace it down to Tokyo, and how that was literally the first place they tried. This would normally lead into what is possibly one of the most famous moments in the series, L and Light saying in unison that they are justice. Strangely enough, however, Light says he is justice after L does. That sort of takes the air out of the whole thing.
Light then figures out that he's being followed, and devises a way to figure out who's following him. This leads to him taking Shiori on a bus to... Somewhere. In the comics and animated series it was a place called Space-Land. In this it seems like Light is just taking Shiori on the bus to wherever they're going on a bus instead of walking.
For some reason, Light decides to confront the agent who's following him, even though that basically gives away the game ahead of time, and serves to undermine a point that Light makes later on in the same scene.
A criminal who escaped the police, Kiichiro Osoreda (Played by Miyagawa Sarutoki) earlier in the movie hijacks the bus, Light passes a note to Shiori saying he's about to jump the guy and take his gun, but Raye Iwamatsu (Not Penber for some reason) (Played by Hosokawa Shigeki) tells him to stay back and let him handle it. Light then objects to that, saying that he could be Osoreda's accomplice. Knowing what Light said earlier, how does that logic work? Knowing Iwamatsu was following him means that he'd have to believe that the bus-jackers were targeting him in order for those two statements to co-exist in one mind. Which would make Light one of the most paranoid people in the world. The qualifier here is that he's not paranoid since there actually are people out to get him. Plus, he's not exactly afraid of anything, he's always calm and collected, planning for every contingency, for every single possibility. I really don't know what the purpose of this was, since it's inconsistent with the character of Light Yagami, and doesn't make a lick of sense in the narrative. Light would never do this, because he would have calculated the effect it might have on the rest of his plan, and figured out that it doesn't work. I'll bet you that I'm probably not even as smart as Light is and I can figure out that saying that to Raye wouldn't have been a good idea.

Raye reveals to Light that he's an FBI agent to keep Light from doing anything stupid, and Light doesn't treat this as strange for some reason. I wasn't able to find out what an actual FBI ID looked like, since the nearest field office is in Jackson, Mississippi. If you want to know what kind of distance that is, look up a map of Mississippi, find Jackson, and then trace a straight line to the bottom-most section of the state. I also looked online, but I couldn't figure out which of the hundreds of ID formats I found were legit, and I'm already running behind on this article.
Light drops his note, and Osoreda finds it. Unlike in the comics, however, Light drops the note he wrote to Shiori instead of a substitute note with plans on it. This is incredibly stupid for a number of reasons. One of which is that while humans have a natural lifespan, free-will can still cut that lifespan short. For instance, if Osoreda had decided to pop a cap in Light's head because of that note, all of his plans would have ended right there. Fortunately, Ryuk was there to scare the hell out of Osoreda and save Light's bacon. Osoreda empties his gun at Ryuk, runs out of the bus, and gets hit by a car. Just like Light planned.
Light takes Shiori to the hospital for an IV of something for some reason. I'm... Not an expert by any means, but I do have a bit of informal paramedic training under my belt, along with a crapload of medical and anatomical research over the years, so I'd like to think I know enough to judge this scene from a scientific standpoint. Shiori wasn't hit by a bullet in that scene, and while she appeared to have suffered some sort of bruising and/or when the bus suddenly stopped, there's no real reason for her to have an IV. Speaking from experience, you don't need an IV to treat a mild bruise or whiplash. If this is some sort of cultural thing, then the Japanese triage system is seriously screwed up. Could it be for stress? Maybe, but I've always heard that stress is best handled with a good nights sleep and a bit of distraction, not drugs. I know this seems petty, but this scene literally makes no sense from a medical perspective. You know how this could be fixed? If Shiori had actually suffered some kind of visible injury. Maybe a concussion, or maybe she could have been shot. If they really needed to go to the hospital for some reason, that would be the best way to deal with it. Not like they really did though, since this whole scene could have been cut entirely without losing anything. Maybe we could have a bit more time dedicated to the rules of the Death Note instead.
Raye goes home to his girlfriend, Naomi Misora (Played by Seto Asaka [and yes, I thought Seto was a male given-name too]), and rather than discussing what went down, they just have coffee and cuddle while quoting random, inapplicable bible-verses. I don't mean from a them perspective, I mean a wider, movie kind of perspective.
One thing I feel the need to bring up right now is that while Naomi and Raye are both American FBI agents, they speak in Japanese even together. I know Naomi's parents are Japanese, and I know Raye is Japanese in this version, but they're still American FBI agents. A little, tiny bit of English between them would have made sense in-character. This is a bit of a logical issue throughout the whole film, which I'll bring up later.
Light then puts his plan to kill off the FBI into action. Since he can't just kill Raye without drawing immediate suspicion upon himself, he decides to kill all of them at once.
Raye cancels his plans for a day, Naomi follows him from the church to find out what he's up to. Raye goes to the train, where he finds an envelope left by Light. He opens it and finds a radio inside, along with a note from Light.
When Raye gets the radio hooked up, Light begins talking with him. Fortunately, he's using a voice-changer in this version, rather than just using his regular voice like he did in the animated series. Aside from a few changes here and there, this whole sequence is basically identical to the version in the comics and the animated series. I'd almost say the animated series copied it from this movie, but considering they both came out in the same year, and considering how long it takes to make an animated show, I highly doubt that.
Light kills a rapist to demonstrate his powers to Raye, but unlike in the comics or animated series, he does this in the train instead of on the street. In fact, their entire exchange takes place exclusively on the train. Light asks Raye if he can identify all of his co-workers in Japan. When Raye says he can't, Light tells him to write his bosses name down on one of the pages. Naturally, Light has written down the circumstances of death so Raye gets the names and faces of all of his co-workers. Raye then writes down their names on pages of the notebook, killing all of them.
Raye disembarks and dies, with Naomi exiting the train to check on him. Light retrieves the envelope, and leaves on the train.
This creates a cascade of events, with Naomi investigating Raye's death, and L placing video and audio surveillance on the Yagami family. Light finds out someone has been in his room through the pencil-lead technique, and from there assumes his room is now chock-full of surveillance, without asking Ryuk to map out all the cameras, although that's sort of implied. In her searching, Naomi stumbles across Shiori and Light. She then confronts Light about her suspecting him to be Kira. This is where the movie starts getting a bit stupid. In the comics, Light meeting Naomi was a coincidence, which made it even more tense. If Light hadn't gone to take his father fresh clothing, he never would have met her, and he might have been exposed. It was a work of pure art how Light figured his way around Naomi Misora in the comics, but the way this whole thing starts out is slightly, slightly freaking stupid.
Naturally, Light tells her he's going to sue her for defamation, while writing her (Fake) name down on a scrap of the Death Note. Shiori is taken aback by Naomi's confrontation, so she and Light leave. For absolutely no reason, Naomi tells Light she didn't give him her real name for absolutely no reason, telling him she was his fiance. If she suspects him to be Kira, why is she giving him all these details instead of letting him figure things out by himself like he did in the comics?
Light then decides to put on a show for L, and thus comes the famous "I'll take a potato-chip! And eat it!" scene. One thing I'd like to praise is the fact that they made the chip-bag large enough for Light to store a TV as well as a decent amount of chips. Something I didn't care for is the fact that the gravity of this scene, and of Light's actions have been significantly reduced, first by the lack of his inner-monologue, and secondly by the lack of music. This is another thing we'll have to come back to.
The next day, Light wakes up and the surveillance has been removed. The way this is set up, it implies the NPA did this while Light was asleep, which literally makes no sense. Ryuk asks Light what he would have done if someone else took the bag of chips, to which Light responds that he's the only one who likes Consomme chips.
Naomi calls up L and tells him that she's going to expose Light as Kira. She then kidnaps Shiori and takes her to the museum where Shiori and Light went earlier in the movie, telling Light to come and confess that he's Kira or she'll kill Shiori. Light goes to the museum and protests to Naomi that he's not Kira. She then tells him her whole name, telling him to kill her or she'll kill Shiori. As the cops arrive, Shiori runs away from Naomi, but Naomi shoots her. Shiori dies in Light's arms, and Naomi puts the gun to her head and kills herself. For some reason we don't see any blood from this, even though she was clearly holding a high-caliber pistol. It's not even like they were afraid to show visceral death-scenes in this movie, since they actually showed Osoreda bleeding from his head-wound onto the street. Seriously, how do you not splatter blood and brains all over the floor and walls from holding what appears to be a nine-millimeter pistol's barrel against your temple?
The police step in to clean up the mess, and attempt to give medical attention to Shiori, but to no avail. Light appears distraught over Shiori's death, but when Ryuk starts poking at him over that, he reveals his plans. Put Naomi into a situation where she would kill Shiori and then kill herself so he would then have ample motivation to join the Kira task-force, because if not for Kira, his girlfriend would still be alive. Funnily enough, that's actually 100% true. If not for his actions as Kira, Shiori would still be alive.
As the day begins to wrap up, Soichiro approaches Light to take him home, and Light tells him that he'd like to join the Kira tack-force. L steps out from the shadows to tell Light that he'd love to have him around, pulling out the same brand of Consomme chips Light was eating from earlier in the movie.
This was basically where the whole movie fell into place for me. Up until then, it seemed like they'd smashed all the life out of the comics, and while that's still somewhat true, seeing L step out of those shadows just taunting Light like he did with those heavy-metal chords playing in the background is still one of the most badass things I've ever seen.
The movie ends with Misa Amane (Played by Toda Erika) being attacked by her stalker, but he dies and a Death Note drops down in front of her. I don't really know when this is supposed to be set, since Ryuk takes an interest in her after seeing her cooking-show. Her incredibly stupid cooking show.

So, let's get back to what I said I was going to come back to earlier on. The first thing we'll cover is Ryuk. I won't say the CGI on him is award-winningly bad, but it's damn close. It would have been less off-putting if they'd used traditional animation. As it is, Ryuk looks like he stepped out of a Kingdom Hearts FMV. That's a consequence of having to insert a character with that bizarre kind of build into a live-action movie. You either go for CGI, CGI and a makeup job, or CGI, animatronics and a makeup job, and one of those is much more expensive and time-consuming than the other. At least if you want it to look good.
Second, Fujiwara Tatsuya has a chronic case of baby-face. At times, this actually takes away from him being able to play Light Yagami convincingly, but when he needs to he nails some of the finer aspects of the character. Another thing to mention is that they hardly ever have him wearing a shirt that isn't made of corduroy. I don't know why this bugs me, but it does. It might just be that in the comics and the animated series Light was always wearing either flat shirts or a suit of some kind. Also (and this is something to blame the stylists for) his hair in general looks nothing like Light's did in the comics.. It's too dark, for one thing. Light rather famously had light-brown hair. Plus, it's styled all wrong. Had he been given a better wardrobe, a hair-color and style which actually matches Light's and some more opportunities to flex as Light, however, I believe he would have been a great choice for the role. The problem is that this version of the character seems a bit too unprofessional, too laid-back for situation in both mannerisms and speech patterns, which I blame on the director more than anything. He's the one who decided to cut the characters inner-monologues out of the movie to add to the ambiguity. This also means we don't get any kind of visible shifts when the characters are doing things. I'm not asking for the full-tilt red tinges to Light's hair, but something would be nice.
One last thing about Light. He's shown playing basketball in the school-gym at one point, when it's been clearly established that tennis is his game. I can roll with it, but I wasn't really expecting him to be playing team-sports.

Next up is Matsuyama Ken'ichi as L, and I have to say he kills it in this role. He's got the look, the mannerisms, the speech-pattern, everything down. Matsuyama, like Alessandro Juliani, is perfect for this role. I don't think there's anyone else they could have gotten that played it as well as he did. There's an occasional issue with his make-up now and again, but other than that the production crew had L down pat for this film.
Before we move on to the rest of the cast, take a look at the right-hand side of this screenshot. You'll see a girl there, hooking up the televisions. One would naturally wonder who she is, given the fact that there weren't any female members of the Kira investigation until Wedy joined the team during the Yotsuba arc. She's an original character, named Sanami. (Played by Komatsu Miyuki) She literally serves no purpose. She doesn't do anything important, she doesn't say anything important, she's just sort of there every now and again. I don't even think they mention her name in the movie at all, and as far as I can tell, she doesn't have more than one name. Your guess is as good as mine if that's her family name or her given name, since I haven't gotten to names in my Japanese lessons yet.
Looking at the above screenshot, how many members of the Kira task-force can you name based on appearances alone? I'd wager two. L, and Touta Matsuda (Played by Aoyama Sota). I know there are only five people there, but I had a hard time identifying which actor was supposed to be playing which character. I still don't know which actors are which characters when it comes to the task-force beyond Soichiro, Matsuda, and L, mostly because none of the others have had any speaking-lines so far.

Since we can't cover anyone else yet, let's deal with the Chief. Kaga Takeshi would be perfect as Soichiro Yagami if he had the mustache and grey hair, but since he doesn't, he hardly looks like the character. Seriously, one of Soichiro's most famous defining characteristics is the mustache, and he doesn't have it! It's starting to look like Matsuda, Naomi and L are the only ones the production team put any effort into looking like they looked in the comics. If you look at Sayu (Played by Mitsushima Hikari) you'll notice her hair is the wrong color too. It's supposed to be a shade of chocolate brown. Their mother and Soichiro's wife, Sachiko isn't pictured here, but her hair is also black, while it's supposed to be dark brown. It sounds like I'm nit-picking, but all I'm asking for is a little consistency between mediums.

Speaking of inconsistency, Erika Toda, who plays Misa Amane doesn't have blonde-hair. Again, what is the single most obvious feature about her character? It's her yellow hair. While they got the styling and clothing down to a thread, the hair color is something that sticks out to me, especially since Death Note is an example of not only great artwork, but great designs as well. You're not likely to forget any of Obata's designs, but at first glance, if you didn't know this was a Death Note movie, most scenes would seem like they were from some random Japanese drama. Hell, the shots of Ryuk with Light look like they've been photoshopped, badly.
So, while the designs and styling leave quite a bit to be desired, the acting is exceptional. The dialogue isn't always great, but the acting works very well. Makes me wish that the Japanese casting directors for the animated series hired the cast of this movie instead of the people they did. Funnily enough, Matsuyama actually played Gelus in the Japanese version of the animated series.
Overall, the plot is solid. Moreso than that of Visions of a God, I think. While they compressed and skipped quite a few things, at least they weren't trying to cram half a series worth of content into a three-hour time-slot. In that regard, it's significantly better than Visions of a God. However, it's still got plenty of issues with presentation. The film relies a little too much on telling rather than showing, especially when it comes to public opinions of Kira, and there are a handful of small gripes I've brought up previously that bugged me. Overall, however, I think this was a story worth telling, it just needed to have a slightly tighter grip on the reigns when it came to pacing and planning out certain events. There are liberties taken with the plot that I like and ones that I don't, but overall it's not a bad way to tell the story.
Unfortunately that brings me to my biggest issue with the film. Most scenes are sorely lacking in appropriate musical accompaniment, with the few that do have music backing them up having very little. What's worse is that there are a pair of licensed songs inserted into the soundtrack. The xxxHolic theme-song, Manatsu no yoru no yume shows up in a romantic scene between Light and Shiori, and the film closes with a song from The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dani California. In that regard the animated series gets a ton of points, since they really seem to have skimped on the soundtrack for this film. What original music they have, however, is pretty sweet. Like I said before, some sweet heavy-metal chords playing at the end before they start tuning up the Chili Peppers. Just to get this out of the way, unless you're doing a period-piece or are going for a very specific feel to a movie or TV show, I despise the use of licensed music. Shows like Death Note, Kamen Rider Drive, Dragon Ball Z and Ressha Sentai ToQger have pretty much ruined licensed soundtracks for me, not that I cared for them to begin with. It's always better to make your own music for something like this, and if they'd leaned a little heavier onto their heavy-metal composers and composed character-themes, action-themes, etc, I think they could have had an incredible soundtrack. I will admit that in some scenes, the lack of a soundtrack made everything a bit more visceral. As it is, however, I was yearning for the soundtrack of the animated series throughout.
One last thing. I didn't watch the entire movie dubbed in English, since I wanted to judge it based on how it was made originally, but I did go back and watch snippets when I was done, and I have to say, the English dub is pretty bad. Ocean came back with almost all of the English cast to dub this movie, and while the performances of Brian Drummond, Brad Swaile, Alessandro Juliani, Christopher Britton and the other leads were perfectly fine, most of the criminals, extras and bit-parts are acted terribly. The DA at the very beginning of the movie is a major offender too. The whole movie might not be that bad in English, but this movie is better watched subbed, since it lets you appreciate the cast the filmmakers have chosen. Honestly, as far as the cast goes in this movie, there's not a whole lot of room for improvement. Except in one regard.
Something I notice in a lot of Japanese media is that no matter where a character is supposed to be from, they're usually played by someone from Japan. The Attack on Titan movies did this, and this movie does it as well. The one main complaint I have would be Fujimura Shunji as Watari. Watari is a British inventor, yet he's played by a Japanese man who doesn't even speak with a British accent. I actually wonder how that would sound, come to think of it. Anyways, it's not really a huge complaint, since he gets the look down pretty well, but it's still something I felt I should bring up, since this is something that bugs me all the time. It bugged me when the Russian soldiers in Snake Eater were all speaking with American accents, it bugged me when Christian Bale was putting on a phony Cockney accent in The Prestige, and it will continue to bug me when things like this happen. While he didn't have much of a British accent per-se in the animated series, he at least had some of the upper-class English inflections to his voice.
This actually brings up a much bigger issue with the language of the film, and the non-english versions of Death Note. Namely, why a British-based detective and his mentor/handler would be speaking in perfect Japanese. I think it actually makes more sense for all the characters to be speaking English, since from what I understand it's taught as a second-language in Japan, but that then brings up more issues that continue to make less sense the more you think of them. In the end, it's best to just shut up and roll with it at some point.
All in all though, I think this movie is well worth watching. It's a unique interpretation of the Death Note story, and it's by far a more enjoyable movie than either Visions of a God or L's Successors were.
In the end, I give it a 7.1* rating. Next week we'll be tackling Death Note II: The Last Name. I'm going to try and get the review done by Wednesday, but it might be a regularly scheduled Sunday release, who knows? I just need to remember to watch the movie before the day I'm supposed to review it so my review doesn't wind up going out at five in the morning next time.

Cover image from Amazon.com, screenshots taken by myself.

Jupiter Ascending

Jupiter Ascending is a movie without a single original concept to its name. I don't think I've ever experienced a single work that borrows so heavily from other, better works.
As you can probably tell from the poster, this film comes to us courtesy of the Wachowski siblings, creators of The Matrix franchise, and contributors to such movies as Assassins, Bound, V For Vendetta, The Invasion, Speed Racer, Ninja Assassin, and Cloud Atlas. The only film they've made that I know for certain people like is The Matrix, the rest seems to be a mixed bag of good to bad reactions. I personally thought The Matrix Reloaded was a pretty good film, but Revolutions seemed like a good idea gone bad. Aside from this film and The Matrix Trilogy I've never seen any other Wachowski movies, so I'm not really able to judge this film in relation to the bulk of their body of work. Fortunately, I can still judge it as a film, and as a film, it's a bit confused to say the very least.
I remember hearing years and years ago that the Wachowski's were working on a new science-fiction franchise, thinking that it might be interesting, and then forgetting about it after not hearing anything about it for years on end. I didn't even connect this movie and that rumor from a few years ago as being the same thing until I looked this up on Wikipedia to do a little research yesterday. I also found out that this movie is a reunion for a bunch of previous Wachowski collaborators, with them bringing over crew from almost all of their previous movies, barring their first two.
Now, judging just from the poster and the cast, what kind of movie do you think this is? Because I can tell you what I thought it was when I first heard about it. Another adaptation of a young-adult novel in the vein of Divergent, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and other movies that have come out in recent years. I was surprised to find out that it wasn't, because it certainly feels like a cut-down adaptation, considering how fast it seems to jump from one scene to the next with very little pause for breath or explanation.
So, let's go ahead and talk about the plot. The main character is named Jupiter Jones, and she's played by Mila Kunis. If the characters name sounds familiar, then you've probably read The Three Investigators books as a kid. (As explanation, one of the titular trio in that series was named Jupiter Jones) As soon as I remembered that, I couldn't get it out of my head. I just kept picturing a Three Investigators movie that takes place in space.
The fact that the main characters name is Jupiter implies that the title actually means something, and it almost does, but once the movie ends, you're left wondering what the hell the point was.
Anyways, Jupiter was born of the union between the son of a British diplomat to Russia, named Maximilian Jones, and some Russian woman who we don't know a whole lot about, named Aleksa. They met when Max was stargazing in the Russian winter, and apparently Aleksa kept him from freezing to death. The problem with that assertion is that, while Max is certainly under-dressed for the kind of Winter that brings in copious amounts of snow, he doesn't appear to be in much danger at all. And considering that his father is a British diplomat, there's no real reason for him to be out stargazing without enough clothes on during the Russian winter If Max had fallen into the water and Aleksa got him out, then I'd say this makes sense, but as it is, the narration doesn't match the events of the film.
Max likes the planet Jupiter, and wants to name his daughter after it. Aleksa doesn't want to name her Jupiter, but what appears to be a SWAT team bursts into their home, steals a bunch of stuff and kills Max when he tries to fight them off. No, we're never given an explanation as to who this gang of renegade special-forces operatives are, or what they're doing running around killing people. But that's not even the half of it. After Max dies, his wife immigrates illegally to the United States before her daughter is born. This just baffles me, since if the son of a British diplomat was killed by a Russian gang, that'd be an international incident! MI6 would start investigating, the CIA would probably be involved, they'd be working with the Russian police, Russian Federal Security Service, all of these agencies would probably become involved.
And do you know what the worst part is? They don't even mention anything about where the murder took place, so for all we know, he could have been killed inside the embassy itself. Which would qualify as an act of terrorism!
And if he's not living at the embassy, why not? Why would he need to live anywhere else? They don't tell us anything about him having a falling out with his parents over his wife, or any other explanation, so we're left without any clue as to what the actual situation is.
And then we get to the fact that Aleksa traveled to the USA instead of, say, the UK, where she'd probably be able to get in without having to resort to illegal means. Or hell, legal immigration to the US probably would have been an option, since she's the wife of the son of the British ambassador to Russia. What I'm saying is that this movie seems to have been married to the idea of making Jupiter an "Illegal alien" as the opening narration states without actually explaining why. Also, Jupiter is born in international waters, having been the daughter of a British citizen and a Russian citizen, so I'm not entirely sure how the law treats that kinda thing.
Props to the casting team for actually getting an actress from the general area of Russia to play Jupiter. I don't particularly mind Mila Kunis as an actress, so I can't really complain about the casting. If nothing else, this movie has a damn fine cast. But then again, so did Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, and look how both of those turned out. Goes to show that a good cast doesn't make for a good movie.
Jupiter goes on to become a housekeeper with her mother. She gets up at five in the morning, scrubs toilets and tiles, dusts, all kinds of typical housekeeping things. This pretty much serves to establish her as a modern-day Cinderella-type, rather ham-handedly I say. She also looks at herself in the mirror while holding up jewelry and clothing that belongs to the rich people she works for, which serves as her "longing for more" sequence, replacing the standard Disney song and dance that princess movies usually have.
The movie then takes a massive shift in location, as we transition to a different planet with futuristic technology. Not that that's immediately apparent, since it's only when they mention Earth as a planet belonging to one of the snooty alien humans that we realize this isn't earth. I like to call these three "The Genocide Triplets". They're the heirs to some massive space empire, and their names are Balem, Titus, and Kalique Abrasax. The three of them brag about the harvest for a bit before getting into a verbal sparring match, which results in Titus attempting to scam Balem out of the rights to the Earth. Balem isn't having any of it, nor is Kalique.
This scene particularly bugged me. It's just that the thought of people "owning" the Earth while it's inhabited by people who don't know that they're part of some kind of empire is something which I don't like. It just feels like an incredibly dumb excuse, which allows a piece of fiction to have all the nice sci-fi technology while also having the fish out of water normal person along for the ride. Not to mention that it doesn't make sense from a logistical standpoint unless you happen to know for a fact, beyond the shadow of a doubt that you and your occupying forces can take the inhabitants of the planet in a fight. These people have their own laws, their own sense of morals, their own technological developments. If they somehow manage to figure out that they're being occupied, at the very best you're going to have an armed rebellion. At the very worst, they're going to win. Even if the occupying forces have superior technology, there's no way to control everything. It's possible that their tech would fall into the hands of someone who would then go on to develop weapons based on it. Weapons that would be better, and manage to get through occupying defenses. But they're not even occupying the planet, they just own it. They're not even really monitoring it, so for all they know, Earth could have developed FTL travel and a Starship named Enterprise and they wouldn't be much the wiser. Although that's more the fault of the film-makers than the characters, since they don't establish anything about the level of occupation that the human aliens have on Earth. This is turning into a running theme, isn't it? Them failing to establish in any way the fine details which would make the world more coherent.
We then cut to a group of mercenaries who all appear to have borrowed their costume-design from other, better movies. We have a woman who's dressed-up to look like Blink from Days of Future Past, some guy who looks like Deadshot from Arrow if he found Alastor Moody's Mad-Eye, and an incredibly skinny version of B.A. from The A-Team. Not-Blink rides around on a hoverbike that looks like a gun. This bike can apparently turn invisible, which is handy for covering up all the glowing lights it's plastered in.
They're here to do... Something. We don't really know what, except that they're hunting some bounty, and they determine that Channing Tatum's character, Caine Wise, is after the same bounty they're looking for. Really, all this sequence serves to do is establish Caine as a badass, since nothing in this scene appears to affect the later plot. When I first watched the movie I wasn't really sure how the file Caine looks for has any kind of connection to the rest of the film, but after looking through that scene again, I can tell what its purpose was.
See, later on in the movie, Jupiter Jones agrees to let some of her eggs be harvested in exchange for five-thousand dollars, and she uses the name Katherine Dunlevy at the same clinic that Caine breaks into, but we're never told how he knew how to get there, or why the mercenaries are staking out the clinic. Caine has heightened tracking senses, and the mercenaries talk him up something big, but this feels like a massive cop-out, especially considering the overall quality of the rest of the plot. And here's the thing, even though I now know what the direct connection was between the obstetrics clinic, Jupiter, and Katherine Dunlevy, it's still fairly badly executed.
I have this idea where if something doesn't make sense at first glance, you should probably go back and rewrite it. Sometimes that's not the best approach to storytelling, but it's a good guideline to follow unless you're purposefully trying to confuse the audience. The fact that I didn't pick up on that little connection is due in part to the fact that they don't really focus on the sheets of paper in the file. Given the fact that the mercenaries were talking about Caine's ability to track someone down from a single cell or some nonsense like that, I thought he was looking for birth records, so I didn't connect the file at the clinic as being related to Jupiter. But even then, she doesn't want to have her eggs harvested, so why does she have a file at the clinic, even if it's under an alias?
The fight-scene between Caine and the unnamed mercenaries is hard to watch. Hundreds of shots are fired, and nobody hits anyone, which wouldn't be too big a deal if they'd directed the action-scene better. With the amount of shots taken at the range they're at, you'd think that Caine would have hit someone, or someone would have hit him.
We're then introduced to Katherine Dunlevy, Jupiter's rich friend who she sometimes impersonates. The exchange they have is utterly pointless, since Katherine never actually shows up at any other point in the movie. Jupiter and Katherine discuss a guy Kat thinks is going to propose to her, and she asks Jupiter what she should wear. Spoiler warning, the guy never shows up on screen, so this is pointless as well.
Jupiter goes into Kat's massive freaking closet to get an outfit for her, and Kat gets knocked out by your typical bug-eyed grey aliens (Incredibly lazy design if you ask me) called "Keeprs" and they test her blood. Jupiter takes a picture of the aliens, and they find her, wiping her memory. Stupidly though, they don't think to check her phone for pictures. Although this raises another question; how did a girl as poor as her afford a freaking iPhone? They sort of mention her overspending later on, but I feel like this was just product placement from Apple. Also, as we later find out, Jupiter is the one they were looking for, and that raises the following question; why didn't the Keepers just test her DNA while they were there? It's obviously not hard for them, so why didn't they do it? They might have had the wrong girl, there's no way for them to know that, since the file in the clinic didn't have a picture in it.
After Jupiter's denied a loan to buy a telescope that was like her fathers (God only knows how she'd know what kind of telescope her father had, since it was stolen before she was born) she agrees to sell some of her eggs. She goes to that clinic Caine broke into earlier in the movie and is almost killed by a bunch of disguised Keepers before Caine jumps in and kills all of them. This action-scene is also pretty badly choreographed, but that's all down to the special-effects people, since the Keeper's are completely CGI as far as I can tell. Caine at one point kicks one of the Keepers, but Channing Tatum's kick obviously doesn't connect with the CGI model, despite the Keeper reacting as if it did. And the rest of the fight-scene just seems way too loosely choreographed. Star Wars this is not.
Caine takes Jupiter to some building in Chicago where he gives us the mind-boggling realization that humanity is not alone in the universe!
I'm sorry, what? How? Why? This is just downright stupid, since we've been fantasizing about there being other species from other planets, friendly and hostile alike, for well over a hundred freaking years! Did the Wachowski's miss all of that? Did nobody at Warner Brothers, or any member of the cast or crew think to put their hand up and say "Hey, this doesn't make any sense from a pop-culture perspective!"
What is one of the most popular entertainment franchises? Star Trek! What's it based around? Travelling through space, meeting aliens, doing battle with aliens, making friends with aliens, having aliens as part of the crew... At this point, it'd be a bigger shock if we were alone in the universe. And I don't buy for a second that someone who has an iPhone and internet access in the 21st century wouldn't know what Star Trek is! Or, for that matter, any of the other pieces of media based around aliens. What's worse is that they treat this like some massive revelation, so I blame this little plot-hole entirely on the the Wachowskis, whoever was editing their script, and also the actors for not bringing it up when they read it. This means you have to accept that Caine has no idea about Earth's popular culture, and that Jupiter doesn't know enough about it to point out the massive flaw in his reasoning for thinking humans wouldn't accept that there are aliens.
Another major flaw I noticed was that Caine gives his gun to Jupiter and tells her how to use it, which I find odd. He says it was to make her feel better, but she could have easily killed or severely wounded him, either on purpose or by accident. It doesn't matter if Caine has heightened reflexes and senses, a good shot to the head would still probably kill him. Or hell, she could have hurt herself. He'd be better off keeping all possible weapons away from Jupiter. Jupiter has also been given a new set of clothes, since she was only in a hospital gown when Caine rescued her.
After he finishes explaining that, he tells Jupiter that he's part wolf, and shows her his gravity-skates, giving some complicated technobabble answer as to how they let him fly around. These are essentially identical to Shadow The Hedgehog's rocket-skates from Sonic Adventure 2, the difference being that that game just said "Hey, we shoved a bunch of rockets into a pair of inline-skates! Is that cool, or what?"
Sure, it might be a massive feat of engineering to cram rockets into a form that would serve as a pair of skates, but I can believe that more than I can believe the technobabble provided in this movie. And at one point, Caine uses them to melt chains without any explanation as to why these gravity-skates serve to conduct any kind of heat. That's the absolute least of the problems in that scene, so I'll wait for that scene to come up before I talk about it anymore.
Caine calls a ship to come and get them, but instead of just hovering by the window, or landing on the little ledge next to the room in the building Caine is in. This, combined with the freaking slow tractor-beam they use instead of a transporter (Which coincidentally looks exactly like the tractor-beams used in Star Trek and Doctor Who.) allows Balem's assault team to blow up Caine's ship and causes a massive chase through Chicago, ending with a lot of buildings damaged and probably a lot of people dead.
Here's where we come to another major failing of the movie, the fact that The Wachowski's seem to think that, in this day and age, an uncloaked dogfight in the skies of Chicago would go unnoticed, even at night. Everyone's got a phone, everyone's got internet access, there would be a hundred videos up on YouTube before those Keepers could wipe any memories. People would be texting their friends and family, posting about it on Twitter and Facebook. Vines would be going up almost instantly.
See, this is the problem Transformers 2 and 3 had, it assumes that they could cover up something like this. Even with their ability to erase memories and repair damaged buildings at a rapid pace, the internet doesn't forget. Ever. You try and delete something? It's already been downloaded and reuploaded to somewhere else fifty times, and from there it's been backed up as well. An alien dogfight over Chicago would be international news before it was over. There's no way they could cover this up.
After that's over, there's a whole scene dedicated to Balem rewatching Caine's fight against the Keepers in the obstetrics clinic, then we meet up with Caine's old friend, Stinger Apini, played by Sean Bean.
This is where we get to what I think is one of the stupidest things in the movie. Stinger raises bees, and his bees form wings around Jupiter, which flap when she moves her arms. The explanation that they give is that "bees recognize royalty", but I know that's bollocks, since bees don't do that in real life. They don't explain why that's the case in this universe, so I would reckon that they were trying to work off bees actual recognition of queen bees. It's not like the recognize human royalty in the real world. And that's the thing, when a piece of fiction doesn't establish the rules of its fictional universe, we're forced to fall back on real-world science, and when that science says that things shouldn't happen the way they do in the movie, you wind up being forced to say that it doesn't make sense.
Sting and Caine are both what they call "Splices," specialized humans with animal DNA spliced into them. We're never actually told what kind of Splice Sting is, although Wikipedia says that he's part honeybee. We also never see Sting's wife, even though he has a daughter, who's apparently got some kind of terminal illness, despite appearing to be in perfect health.
Sting explains to Jupiter how humans aren't from earth, and how other humans killed all the dinosaurs and seeded the planet with human-beings. That's just idiotic, and I'm going to explain why. Later on in this movie, the other humans are revealed to be extremely long-lived, but that doesn't matter, since they pretty much used the least efficient method of colonization and breeding for their purposes. I don't care how long you live, if you want to breed as many humans as possible in the shortest period of time, especially for their purposes, why would you just let humans evolve over the course of a hundred-thousand years when you could just let them breed as is until they're ready to harvest?
Jupiter calls her home to try and tell her family that she's alright, but her cousin who convinced her to sell her eggs is the only one who's home. For some reason, he's playing what appears to be Dark Souls II. The problem is that he keeps taking his hand off the controller, which isn't something you do in Dark Souls. I haven't even played Dark Souls and I know that much about it. I also know that Dark Souls isn't a two-player game, but that didn't stop them from giving the little kid in the scene a controller as well.
The mercenaries and Keepers show up to kill Jupiter, but Caine and Stinger kill all the Keepers, and (for no explicable reason) the mercenaries kill one of their own people and abduct Jupiter. Caine sees this, and stows away on their ship. (Which looks like Slave I crossed with something from Star Fox.)
They fly all the way to another planet, where the mercenaries take Jupiter to see Kalique, who tells Jupiter about her peoples fixation on genetics, gives her a fancy dress, shows them the baths that let them go back to their peak of perfection and live for millennia (Giving us a nice view of Tuppence Middleton's butt), and shows Jupiter that she's a "Recurrance" of the Genocide Triplet's mother. Apparently they have laws regarding what happens when someone who is genetically identical to a previous person shows up. That begs the question, how do they deal with that when genetically identical people show up while the other person is still alive?
This thing about a pit of liquid bringing you back to your youth is rather obviously copied from the pit used by Ra's Al Ghul uses in the Batman comics to heal deadly wounds and bring him back to life. There are probably other things that did similar things as well.
Before any questions about the "genetic recurrence" thing can be asked or answered, Caine and the space-police show up to take Jupiter to The Entitled Hall to go through the legal process of claiming her title, giving Jupiter yet another change of outfit.
On the way to the , we get some innuendo between Caine and Jupiter, with Jupiter asking him if he wants to bite her (He lost his job with the space police because he bit an Entitled's throat out) and mentioning that she likes dogs, both of which could be turned sexual fairly easily, the latter of which could take a turn for the creepy if you think about it too much.
It's at this point where we shift from exposition to a montage of bureaucracy. Five solid minutes in the middle of the movie are dedicated to the main characters running around, doing paperwork, being given the runaround, and generally wasting the audience's time. They also introduce a robot character named Bob who never shows up again. He's a robot lawyer, and (like all of the male robots in this little department) looks incredibly effete. This little montage ends with an extremely slow scene, before we get the inevitable Sean Bean betrayal. Because if Sean Bean is in something, he's either gotta die, betray someone, or both.
Stinger turns Jupiter over to Titus Abrasax, the Genocide Triplet who hired Caine to track down Jupiter.
See, he doesn't need to do that. All he'd have to do is phone up Caine and ask him to bring Jupiter to him and boom, problem solved. It's only because of this Caine figures out that Titus is evil.
Titus appears to have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with his mother, bordering on an Oedipus complex. Yes, he's trying to manipulate her, but he still seems a little too into his goals, which is to marry Jupiter.
Titus goes on to give Jupiter yet another new outfit, he treats her to dinner, and then goes on to explain what the liquid is that they use to restore their youth. Spoiler warning, it's people. Yes, they literally copied that little twist from Soylent Green, and it's just as anticlimactic as you'd think it would be.
When that's revealed, Jupiter is holding a tube of the stuff, and I figured she'd drop it, and it would shatter. To absolutely nobodies surprise, she did.
So, as I said before, Titus wants to marry Jupiter, which gets creepier the longer you think about it. For one thing, she looks just like his mother. Second, she's genetically identical to his mother. Third, she's in her twenties, and he's thousands of years old. And Jupiter doesn't seem to have any kind of negative reaction to this beyond simple bafflement. This is the point in the movie that I declared that it was Twilight In Space. There's an immortal vampiric character competing with a dog-man for the affections of a bland woman who's important because...
Anyways, the explanation he gives is that towards the end of her life, his mother was attempting to preserve the lives of humans, and he was converted to the same cause. He says he wishes for her to inherit his planets to keep his brother and sister from harvesting them, but due to a poorly-explained legal system, we're never given an explanation as to whether he could have just put her in his will or if he needed to marry her. Apparently Jupiter studied up on the Galactic Legal System during the montage earlier, so I would presume that planets can only be inherited by spouses or children in their legal system. I'd also presume prenup agreements don't exist, since Jupiter never asks for one. Then again, she seems incredibly thick during this whole bit, not questioning Titus's motives in the slightest, or asking to see Caine before Titus has had enough time to kill him, or doing anything that would be considered smart in this situation.
Titus does the inept villain thing where he tries to kill Caine without actually killing him. He tosses Caine out the airlock (An airlock filled with emergency air-pods that are easy to activate) without taking off any of his gear. This allows him to use his grav-boots to blast off his shackles and grab an emergency-pod, which forms into a space-suit around him.
The Aegis shows up right at the end of his air-supply (Completely ignoring that he could have just grabbed another of the ten or twenty emergency-suits he knocked out of the airlock.) and they bring him back to full-health.
Caine confronts Sting, who tells him that he needed the Soylent Green to heal his daughter, and Titus gave it to him in exchange for turning over Jupiter. There are some comments about Caine's past with Sting (Mentioning something about breaking through a field of Warhammers, with no explanation given as to what those are) and after Caine asks Sting if he's got anything else that could be used against him, they go ahead and suit up in giant robots.
While they're doing that, Jupiter is getting ready for her wedding to Titus. This section of the movie has a fairly heavy saturation of stuff it's ripped-off. The clothing and general design of the wedding-chapel seems fairly heavily influenced by The Hunger Games, the robots clearly take a lot of influence from Mobile Suit Gundam, Power Rangers, Pacific Rim, Neon Genesis Evangellion, and let's just throw Voltron and Metal Gear in for good measure, shall we?
The drop-pods are copies from Pacific Rim, which copied that from Evangellion, the combining nature of the robots is from Voltron and Power Rangers, and the escape-pod stuck in the chest, plus the robots massive freaking wings is obviously taken from Gundam. The ships look like they're pulled straight out of Firefly, The Matrix and/or Alien as well.
Then we get to the rest of the scene, which rips off the ending of Guardians of the Galaxy, with a touch of Enders Game and The Matrix and Matrix Revolutions tossed in for good measure.
Caine and Sting bust through the barricade, bust into the ship, and stop the wedding. The give Jupiter another change of clothes, and head back to Earth. We're just going to ignore the fact that busting through the hull of a ship should start to evacuate the atmosphere for a second and focus on the fact that Jupiter immediately deduces that Titus was lying without much evidence for that idea. Yeah, he was holding her hand onto the thing etching the ring on her finger, but as far as she knows, he could believe that he's about to die, so he could be trying to give her the rights to his planets before he's killed.
Even though Titus was going to kill Jupiter, she doesn't want him to die for this reason, and just tells Caine to get her out of there.
Spoiler warning, neither of the first two Genocide Triplets show up after they're encountered by Jupiter, and we don't even know that Kalique had any malevolent intentions, since the only character who says the she does is Titus, and he's got plenty of reason to make Jupiter distrust Kalique.
Our characters go back to Earth to find Jupiter's family has been abducted by the last of the Genocide Triplets, Balem. They're told this by one of Balem's people that she needs to come with him and he won't kill her family. Thing is, they don't have any reason to trust him. And the condition for freeing her family is turning over all of her Entitled possessions to Balem. And the worst part is that she agrees to this! So she goes to his base on (Surprise) Jupiter!
Fortunately, she brings along an Aegis escort. Stupidly enough, she doesn't bring one onto Balem's ship with her, so the Aegis escort, along with Caine and Stinger, is left behind outside of Jupiter.
Caine takes one of the robots down into Jupiter, and barely survives the descent.
Meanwhile, Jupiter keeps delaying signing her planets over to Balem. Mind you, there's no indication that she's doing this on purpose, especially since she doesn't know she's got any backup coming.
Caine shows up, kicks ass, saves Jupiter from being killed, and for some reason, gives her his gun, despite him being the one in a position to cover her getting her family to safety. They also share a kiss in this scene, which isn't a smart thing to do in combat, and isn't something I would have included if I was making the film. Then again, there are a lot of things in this movie that I'd either shorten, change, or cut entirely.
After saving her family, Jupiter displays some hitherto unknown fighting skills as she beats up Balemm. They then get pulled into a hole, and into a tractor-beam. They fight some more, and Balem confesses that he killed his mother. Balem gets the upper-hand, then Jupiter gets the upper-hand. Rather stupidly, neither of them take the opportunity to kill the other when they gain the upper-hand.
Caine defeats the dragonborn he was fighting and comes to rescue Jupiter after Balem dies, and they reenact the ending of Big Hero 6 almost to a T, after wasting about thirty seconds cooing at each other while the portal that allows them to exit Jupiter's atmosphere is collapsing. If they'd have hopped to it, they could have gotten onto the Aegis ship with about ten seconds to spare, rather than having to ride outside the ship.
After that, Jupiter goes back to her boring existence of cleaning toilets and houses. I don't know about you, but if I owned the Earth, and I came from practically poverty, I wouldn't clean another house in my life. I wouldn't even clean my OWN house, I'd buy a freaking space-ship (If I hadn't inherited one) and take all my family and friends with me to that. Then I'd reveal all this to the world and show them all the cool technology we've got. I wouldn't go back to menial labor and an earthbound existence after experiencing FTL travel like that.
Caine and Stinger get their wings back (Their wings were taken after their courtmartial) and Caine and Jupiter spend their free time flying around Chicago. Then the movie ends.
All in all, this movie sucked, and not just because it was unoriginal. You could rip off everything, and as long as you just made a decent movie, you'd be fine. Originality isn't an issue as far as I'm concerned, if it does something well, I'm fine with it. Unfortunately, this movie is both unoriginal, poorly written, and poorly paced.
A complete summary of everything this movie has copied from would be pretty freaking long, so I'm just going to list off a few that I didn't mention already in the review. There are shots copied from Star Wars, the entire end seems to have been copied in equal parts from Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed, and Uncharted, plenty of designs appear to be copied from Doctor Who, and the general concept of the movie just comes down to "Science-Fiction Cinderella Story"
That's literally all this movie is, Cinderella with a science-fiction aesthetic. Then we get to the characters, and hoo boy, are most of the characters unlikable. Jupiter Jones herself doesn't even really have any claim to main-character status, because she's equal parts stupid, and honestly, has no real purpose. Literally any other character could have served exactly the same purpose with zero change to the plot, and that's where you're faced with the dilemma of either cutting her out entirely, or giving her some kind of use. All she does is show the audience some cool stuff, and get rescued by Caine whenever she's in danger. And the one time she saves herself, it comes straight the hell out of nowhere, since she's never displayed any self-defense skills at any other point in the film.
I'll say this for it though, the effects were really good (When they weren't misaligning CGI enemies to Channing Tatum's kicks) and the music was freaking awesome. But that's a pair of small positive points compared to all the negative ones.
The inherent problem with the film is the same problem that Lord of Magna had, the back-story was way more interesting than the actual plot. The whole coincidental genetic replication bollocks just wasn't interesting to me. The society surrounding the industrialized genocide was a much more interesting idea, and they barely touched on that! Hell, the story of how Caine and Stinger got kicked out of the military would have made for a better movie. I'd have loved to see a movie about Sean Bean and Channing Tatum as space-cops! Maybe you want to make a movie about that instead?
In the end, I give this movie a 0.6*. I can't really tell what this movie was trying to do, or what kind of message it was trying to send, but whatever it was, they failed. The fact that the Wachowski's resorted to ripping off their own material at a few points in the film is testament enough to that.
Hopefully I'll be seeing you guys next week with Rodea: The Sky Soldier!

Image from impawards.com