On February 6, Jupiter Ascending hit theaters. It’s currently running 22% at Rotten Tomatoes. By all accounts, it’s a dumb action flick that relies too much on VFX, has no coherent plot and a wooden romance, the oddest casting choices, and is just dumb. Let me tell you why I’m probably going to love it.

Eddie Redmayne

Redmayne is playing Balem Abrasax, the eldest child of our central family in this film. He stands to inherit Earth and wishes to harvest all of the life on the planet for an eternal youth serum type thing (or something). Jupiter stands in the way of his inheritance, so he places a bounty on her head. In the trailers, he’s mostly telling people to kill Jupiter. Now, I don’t really care about Balem or his motivations or anything. Frankly, he doesn’t sound like the most interesting villain. What I am excited about is this: Balem is basically sleazy space prince. I’m totally down for anything that makes Eddie do this:

And makes him wear this:

I don’t know if anyone is familiar with Redmayne’s body of work, but this isn’t the golden retriever puppy I’m used to seeing him as. (My Week With Marilyn comes to mind.) Also, I have no idea what’s going on with his voice. Really, he’s a huge reason. I just want to see what he’s doing.

Production design

It’s simply gorgeous. There is nothing aesthetically like an opulent space opera. This is exactly what I want everything I watch to look like. It’s easiest to point to some pictures here:

Really, this doesn’t cover the entire scope of the design of the film. Alien and android designs, a leather dress, military style uniforms. Exactly everything I could ever ask for.

Space Opera

There is absolutely nothing like a space opera. A sprawling melodramatic adventure tale set in outer space, often involving advanced weaponry and warriors and huge battles with ships. They are epics. War epics. But in space. And we have had very little of them in recent years. I need my fix between now and December (when the next space opera, Star Wars, will be coming out).

The Wachowski siblings

This film marks the return of Andy and Lana Wachowski to directing films featuring original work they have written. The last original script written by the siblings was The Matrix. Andy and Lana Wachowski did The Matrix, yes.

Suddenly, the whole dumb action flick with an incoherent narrative thing makes sense. (Isn’t that, like, their MO?)

Admittedly, not everything they’ve done recently has been a hit. But really, they’re worth taking a chance on, right? What else has really had the kind of impact and cult success that The Matrix has? Whether one likes it or not, or acknowledges that the sequels exist, or whatever, the film has had an enormous influence on science fiction film and in popular culture. (Plus, Laurence Fishburne and Gina Torres met on the set of one of the films, and they’re such a cute couple.)

Maybe that’s why in the end I’m willing to suffer the odd casting choices and clunky dialogue and wooden romance and a made-up industry no one cares about and weird SpaceyName McSpaceRoyalty names. It looks like a dumb science fiction action flick. It is a dumb science fiction action flick.

But you know who’s good at dumb science fiction action flicks? The Wachowskis.

It looks so terrible, it seems to cross back into amusing and fantastic, or at least a while ride.

The Mary Sue review of the film is titled: “Jupiter Ascending Is The Worst Movie Ever Go See It Immediately“. Subtitle: “It’s so stupid it’s beautiful.” Hey, I trust the Mary Sue in matters like these, and that review is exactly everything I expected and want out of this movie.

Let’s start with the basics: this movie is not The Matrix. This movie is not Dune. This movie is not Star Wars, nor is it The Fifth Element. No, this movie is like if all of those movies plus the music video for the Backstreet Boys’ “Larger Than Life” and the really weird parts of the Mass Effect trilogy all got really drunk at a party and had a massive orgy while H.P. Lovecraft filmed it. That’s Jupiter Ascending.

Perfect.

As Prof. Cornell likes to say, “the only movies worth your time are really, really good ones and really, really bad ones. Everything in the middle is a waste.”

Guess where on the scale this movie falls on?