I saw Jupiter Ascending this afternoon, and — shocker! — despised it to the depths of my soul. I hate the Wachowskis, the Warner Bros. guys who approved this thing, CG space fantasies in general, the fans, myself for wasting two hours of my life, the production designers who labored to recreate the aerial metropolis of The Phantom Menace, the guys who made Channing Tatum‘s wolf ears and Gugu Mbatha-Raw‘s deer ears, the way everyone “acts” like they haven’t an honest thought or bone in their bodies, those godawful bees buzzing around Sean Bean‘s farm, Eddie Redmayne‘s revoltingly prissy performance, Drew McWeeny and Alonso Duralde for saying “okay, sure, it’s silly but it sure is lively!”…don’t get me started. The CG galactic fantasy visions of Andy and Lana Wachowski are everything I hate in mainstream movies today…everything thick, dreary, narcotized, spiritually stifling, mandated by corporate goons and therefore more or less the same space shite we’ve been sitting through for the last 25 years, constipated and rank with tired formula.

Thanks to HE reader “Geoff”

I expected to slip into my usual hate funk during the opening ten minutes, but I was choking on Jupiter Ascending within seconds.

It begins with Mila Kunis (Jupiter Jones) narrating her life, starting with the meeting of her mother (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and father (James D’Arcy) somewhere in Russia. D’Arcy is looking through a telescope next to a bridge over a river, and Kennedy, naturally mystified, says to D’Arcy, “Excuse me, sir, but whatever are you doing?” Right away I hated her and her spawn. And the Wachowskis for writing the dialogue, and for telling Kennedy to over-act the line. You stupid fucking cow, I said to Kennedy’s character. You’re walking along and you notice some fellow looking through a telescope (generally an indication of curiosity and intelligence) and your first thought is “Good heavens, what a truly absurd thing to do…this man needs to explain himself”? D’Arcy turns and smiles like an idiot and explains that to Kennedy he’s looking at the heavens and (I think) Jupiter in particular, and that he’s so delighted by the beauty of it all. And then they start beaming at each other.

This is truly terrible, I told myself. The dialogue in this film is going to turn my brain into chewing gum. And that’s when I steeled myself and said to myself, “Okay, fuck it…here it comes.” And I took it as long as I could. But at the 90-minute mark I almost blurted out “I can’t take it any more!” Maybe I did say it out loud. I was in a bad way so who knows? What I know for sure is that I suddenly bolted out of my seat and got the hell out of there.