The Wachowskis' second attempt at an original sci-fi universe was considerably less successful than their Matrix movies. Critical mauling and a disappointing box office cume, in relation to its huge budget, instantly relegated Jupiter Ascending to the realm of a box office bomb and the accompanying obscurity. But did it really deserve it?

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The movie is undeniably flawed but there's so much going in within it that a number of great qualities are often overlooked by prospective fans. With this in mind, here are some of the reasons why Jupiter Ascending isn't as bad as its reputation suggests and some of the reasons why its critics are right.

Is: The Editing

Jupiter Ascending's main issue, that bleeds into everything else both positive and negative about it, is its overall incoherence. There are pacing issues in the story that don't help this but the main offender in this instance is the movie's editing.

Action sequences, which the movie is heavy on, become garbled and transitions between very different types of scenes are simply jarring for the audience.

Isn’t: Visual Effects

In the–albeit brief–moments where the movie slows down, Jupiter Ascending can be a pretty gorgeous sci-fi movie where the combination of sets, actors, and computer effects blend together very well.

The movie frequently uses darker backdrops for scenes but mostly avoided the usual accusations of making everything look too gritty and, on top of the very varied vistas, some of the space footage is intermittently quite beautiful.

Is: The Cinematography

John Toll's cinematography on Jupiter Ascending isn't so much bad as the movie's use of it is. There are plenty of pleasing wide shots in the movie but, in conjunction with the editing, they come and go all too quickly leaving the majority of this sprawling space opera to be made up of close up back and forths of actors explaining things.

Perhaps if scenes were allowed to play out more in the wide shots, taking in all of the work that had gone into the movie, then audiences would have more readily latched on to the world that the Wachowski's were trying to spin.

Isn’t: A Genuine Attempt at An Original Story

For all its fumbling, Jupiter Ascending is making an honest attempt to build something new for audiences. Its combination of comedy, fantasy, science-fiction, romance, and action are ultimately quite clunky but the cocktail was clearly meant to appeal to a wide demographic, a lot of whom might not necessarily be interested in a high-concept space opera movie.

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The universe presented in the movie is very detailed and well thought out, with its own rules and regulations governing its characters and their motivations, not to mention establishing a clear past and future that stretches far beyond the story presented in the movie.

Is: It Still Feels Like an Adaptation

The sheer amount of detail crammed into Jupiter Ascending's running time, however, makes it feel like it was never originally meant to be a movie at all.

The hurried course of events, and the amount of time that characters have to spend just explaining things, makes the movie seem like it's just another adaptation of a young adult novel. Not to mention the overwhelming similarity that the basic plot already has to The Matrix.

Isn’t: Interesting Designs

One of the things that originally prevented Jupiter Ascending from finding a wider audience may, in fact, end up being the thing that enables it to live on in cult movie infamy in the future – it's incredibly weird.

Aside from the gene-splicing fixation of the movie's universe, which produces somewhat of a 'Star Wars for furries' effect, the design of ships and worlds within the movie is something that a fan can get completely wrapped up in.

Is: Too Many Plot Details and No Resolution

As mentioned, there's a lot of different stuff going on in Jupiter Ascending. Too much, really. The actual story seems to come into conflict with the movie's desire to forge a foundation for more stories.

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By the end, most of the movie's problems are left hanging. The antagonist is gone but could easily return, his equally-nefarious siblings never face any kind of justice and a number of other plot threads are simply dropped entirely.

Isn’t: Female-centric Action Fantasy

As evidenced by the fact that people still take the time to discuss it, Jupiter Ascending does have its fans and always has. It is an objectively interesting movie, if only for its place within cinema as a whole rather than its actual content.

It remains the only major blockbuster of any kind from trans directors where one of them openly presented themselves as such at the time of the movie's release and its female-orientated story offers an uncommon perspective on the tropes of the classic fairytale archetypes aimed at young girls.

Is: An Insanely Passive Protagonist

Jupiter with flowers in her hair in Jupiter Ascending

The main reason why Jupiter Ascending became quickly overshadowed in the burgeoning field of female-centric sci-fi action is that it completely fails to cater to the audience's desires to see female protagonists within these types of stories in which they have actual agency.

Despite being the literal Queen of the Earth, Jupiter Jones spends the vast majority of the movie named after her doing what men tell her to do. She even almost gets coerced into marrying one of them at one point before being rescued by another even more assertive man.

Isn’t: A Legendarily Over-the-Top Villain

Eddie Redmayne looking scared in Jupiter Ascending

You could just as easily count this as one of the movie's negative qualities but Eddie Redmayne's performance as the villain is probably the most widely-known, and widely-loved, thing about Jupiter Ascending.

Redmayne's absolutely ridiculous turn as Balem Abrasax combines the actor's love of 'mumble-whispering' with hilariously unrestrained outbursts to create a uniquely unhinged antagonist with plenty of scenery to chew on.

The fact that, after becoming a huge talking point regarding the widely-panned movie, Redmayne won Best Actor at the Oscars a few weeks later makes the performance, and the movie overall, all the more fascinating.

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