Graham J. Langridge, blueprints for commercial towing vehicle USCSS Nostromo. Included as a pullout in Alien Vault: The Definitive Story of the Making of the Film, by Ian Nathan (Voyageur Press, September 2011).
100 FILMS IN 2015 → Jupiter Ascending (2015)
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
“I CREATE LIFE!! …And I destroy it.”
Here is my feeling about this movie: it is your garbage. It is garbage for you. “Is this how straight dudes feel at the movies all the time????” I hissed SEVERAL times during this movie. “Like someone carefully noted down your early pubescent fantasies and then threw 100 MILLION DOLLARS at them?”
Top marks go to evil space royal Eddie Redmayne, whose breathy ennui is offset by bouts of mummy’s boy shrieking, all delivered with a “petite-mort” look on his face that suggests he is being fellated by eternity itself.
Someone on tumblr described it as the novel all girls wrote when they were 14 and frothing with a mix of swelling hormones and fading Disney fantasies, which I have to say is accurate to the point of pain. I mean, gorgeous Russian toilet scrubber finds out she is actually a space princess when a werewolf space marine rescues her from death at the hands of Greys? Pardon me, werewolf ANGEL space marine with a Sad because his wings are gone. And then everything is Alexander McQueen dresses and melodrama and bees, for some reason, and Eddie Redmayne doing his best heroin-addicted Voldemort impression.
The plot is this: the Wachowskis were given an extraordinary amount of money to make whatever the hell they wanted, and what they wanted to make is exactly what we all, secretly, deep down, want to make: the big-screen adaptation of that Stargate fanfic you wrote when you were fourteen that really went off the rails and began to inhabit its own universe, complete with original characters, wolf-men, and bees. That’s Jupiter Ascending.
“Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”