Spaced Out: JUPITER ASCENDING

Jupiter Ascending is an all-you-can-eat sci-fi smorgasbord. Writer-directors Andy and Lana Wachowski provide a generous spread filled with way more than one person, or, as it turns out, one film could possible devour in one sitting. It’s a big goofy space opera serving non-stop silly names, strange creatures, intergalactic scheming, gobbledygook jargon, majestic CGI vistas, swooshing spaceships, and laser guns that go pew-pew-kaZAAp, all wrapped up in an impenetrably convoluted mythos. Unlike the Wachowski’s Matrix trilogy, which invited a casual view deeper and deeper down a nutso rabbit hole, this offering is crazy from the jump. They’ve gotten so far into their worldbuilding they’ve forgotten to leave an entry point for the rest of us. I don’t mean to give off the impression that I hated it. On the contrary, I admired its idiosyncrasies, but only to a point. I felt perpetually on the outside looking in.

At least the view’s nice. It has spectacular production design, from spaceships that look like sea-creatures with throne-room interiors, to massive steam-punk factories nestled in gas giants, whirring robots, ornate gowns, glowing gewgaws and weird alien thingamabobs from gravity boots to memory wipes and high-tech paperwork. It has a sweeping Michael Giacchino score in full pa-rum-pa-pum-pum epic swelling mode, immersive bleeping and rumbling soundscapes, and a bevy of hilarious camp voices. So it looks and sounds like a great pulp space adventure. But for all its whiz-bang flash and sizzle, as clean and shiny as anything the Wachowski’s have made, it’s chintzy on a human scale, with ridiculous characters, hazy motivations, and an overcomplicated story that’s at once too much and too little. It’s both overstuffed and thinly repetitive.

What, exactly, is supposed to be happening amidst the shimmery sci-fi frippery on display? Well, you see, there’s this cleaning lady (Mila Kunis) who, after the movie's weirdly scattered and confused false starts, agrees to sell her eggs to help her illegal immigrant family. Strange place to start, but the movie doesn't seem to care. It’s just a place where she can be attacked by evil alien bounty hunters and saved at the last minute by a dashing space guy, Channing Tatum with elvish ears and a wolfish grin. He eventually takes her to space, where three wealthy warring alien siblings (Eddie Redmayne, Tuppence Middleton, and Douglas Booth) each want her captured for their individual purposes. Turns out she’s a reincarnation of their mother, a matriarch in a race of practically ageless aliens who seeded the Earth with human DNA millennia ago and are ready to collect their harvest.

They want to trick Kunis into giving up the rights to Earth, since their mother left her eventual reincarnation that very planet in her will. Make sense? It takes more than an hour to introduce all these stakes, as we head to each evil sibling one at a time in episodic encounters, each more dangerous than the last. Allegiances shift, strange creatures and rituals appear, and elaborate background is filled in, like learning Tatum is an animal-human hybrid – part dog, part man – with a complicated sketchy past. Elsewhere we see a part-bee man named Stinger (Sean Bean), armies of winged dinosaur things in trench coats, and a man-sized pilot with the face of an elephant. (When given an order, he trumpets with determination.) It’s fun, but exhausting keeping up with the free-floating oddities that never seem to connect with any real purpose. They’re laid out in earnestly campy detail, so at least some of the giggles these concepts provoke are intentional delight.

It should be a simple story of empowerment, with Kunis as a special person who discovers her alien gifts and ascends to a place of power in the galaxy while interacting with weird beasties and strange beings. Instead, she flails and falls through busy CGI spectacle, bounced helplessly from one elaborate plot point to the next. Those who erroneously claim the Star Wars prequels are only about trade routes won’t be happy to find that Jupiter Ascending is literally only a fight over the deed to Earth. Now, granted, it has energetic action, vials of youth serum, warring factions of creature-people, and nods towards usual Wachowski themes of destiny, reincarnation, conspiracies, redemption, consumption, and rampaging capitalism. And the actors are up for the mood of the thing, with Kunis and Tatum going totally sincere, and others like Redmayne going batty with affected whispery high-pitch mumbling and stiff movements.

But with only the barest rooting interest in any character’s plight, it’s hard to care about the serious craziness on screen. It’s a film of incredible sights put to use muddling through the political machinations of a galactic oligarchy, half-hearted self-actualization, and a totally unbelievable romantic subplot. Throughout, obvious apocalyptic stakes are weirdly downplayed, the main narrative and emotional thrusts drifting away. I appreciated the Wachowskis’ commitment to loony concepts. Keep in mind I think Speed Racer is their best work. But they didn’t crack this narrative open in any compelling way. There’s a fun movie hidden somewhere in Jupiter Ascending's confusion of dropped plot lines and ridiculous implications, but they didn’t quite find it. Perhaps it’s no surprise to find buried with this mess a cameo from Terry Gilliam, the patron saint auteur of fantasy follies. This movie may not work, but it’s the kind of distinctive, eccentric, personal failure I find hard to dismiss entirely.

Fear and Supposing: THE ZERO THEOREM

Terry Gilliam has a touch of the madman about him. It’s in the cursed behind-the-scenes strife that follows him from production to production, making it something of a miracle that he’s made as many movies as he has, let alone so many good and distinctive ones. It’s in his love of crowded set dressing and baroque effects that fill the frame with cacophonous visual stimulation, from the historical phantasmagoria of Time Bandits or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to the sci-fi landscapes of 12 Monkeys and cracked “real world” of Fisher King and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s in his deep love and appreciation for characters too oddball and individualistic to fit in the society around them, no matter how desperately the world wants to crush them, even and especially if said crushing actually happens.

His latest film is The Zero Theorem, set in a dystopian future crowded with an exaggerated overstimulation that feels like a close cousin to his Brazil’s obsession with consumption, bureaucracy, and vents. Scripted by Pat Rushin and brought to vivid life by Gilliam and his team, this sci-fi world is like our own but worse, filled with screens everywhere you look, blaring advertisements and propaganda, some deviously personalized to float alongside you wherever you go. It’s part of a web of surveillance and work terminals, designed to make people nothing more than inputs, data to be crunched. At the center of this stimuli overdose is Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz). He’s reacted to his world by slipping into a waking coma of existential crisis.

It’s understandable. He just wonders what the point of it all is. Every day his boss (David Thewlis) informs him Mancom’s CEO (a white-haired Matt Damon) is demanding more data. A slogan on the wall: “Don’t Ask. Multitask.” Qohen would rather be reassigned to work from home, without having to commute a few blocks – past the billboards, warning signs, screens, and The Church of Batman the Redeemer – just to sit blankly in front of his screen. And so Qohen is given the thankless, impossible task of crunching numbers to solve The Zero Theorem. Everyone who has attempted it has failed, leaving their brains a scrambled mess. Qohen’s the last best hope, mostly because his brain’s already broken in.

There’s palpable madness to this world, as Qohen moves videogame cubes around and the insane world moves with a nonchalant logical illogic. Gilliam’s expert with madness, but at worst his films can get sick on that sensation. And so it is here. Waltz is quite good at selling the mood of a man in the process of shutting down. He thinks he’s due a phone call that’ll tell him his life’s purpose. It’s a quixotic hope, but it’s all he clings to. Meanwhile, The Zero Theorem is nothing less than an attempt to prove that “everything adds up to nothing,” as mindlessly hopeless as anything. The movie is one of fear and neurosis, as psychologically cramped as the mise-en-scène.

Here and there, though, it opens up by allowing more agreeably weird characters into the mix. Thewlis and Damon are charmers in a handful of scenes, but the movie really comes to life when Waltz is paired with a smart aleck teen intern (Lucas Hedges), who has a looseness and an externalized pushiness that pairs well with his co-star’s interiority. There’s also room for a sensual maybe-dream-girl (Mélanie Thierry) and a computerized shrink (Tilda Swinton, who at one point dons a bald cap and oversized sunglasses while rapping). And Gilliam’s design is always impressive, with droll visual bits of funny business. I especially liked the wall of prohibited activities behind a public bench, including a ban on smiling.

In the end, it’s a film I liked in theory more than in practice. It’s tediously overflowing with free-floating anxiety, generalized paranoid fear and sentimental confidence in man’s ability to float above society’s ills, no matter the delusion necessary to achieve said transcendence. But it’s trapped in a beautiful box of its own making. It looks great, but it is stuck without much of a narrative drive, little in the way of interesting character progression, and a world that starts to fall apart before it manages to get anywhere. I liked looking at it for a while, and enjoyed individual moments, but too often I felt myself straining to get on its wavelength. I felt like Qohen when asked if he’s having a good time. With visible discomfort, he answers, “Approximately.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Reader, I must confess that I’m as likely to find a Terry Gilliam film as baffling as I do dazzling. Don’t get me wrong, I like the chap and adore some of his movies, but I’ve never really felt an emotional connection to any of his work. Even Time Bandits, my favorite Gilliam movie – not counting Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Fisher King, films I still haven’t seen – has its share of moments where I just stare at the screen with my forehead wrinkling asking myself “what’s all this then?” And yet, I’m drawn to each new Gilliam movie, not just for the imagery that’s delightfully inventive and genuinely surprising, a consistent attribute dating back to his days of Monty Python. I’m drawn to his work for the sense that he’s spinning a delirious story and loving every minute of it, whether or not we can keep up. I think it is because of this possible handicap that I enjoyed The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus as much as I did, not just because it’s one of Gilliam’s most accessible works, but because it just might be his most personal.

Doctor Parnassus, played by the great Christopher Plummer, is a sort of wizard as storyteller, an immortal who derives his power not just from his deal with the Devil (Tom Waits, of course), but from the sheer power of the imagination. There’s an early scene that finds Parnassus and the Devil discussing the nature of existence. It’s a tensely playful conversation until Parnassus experiences a revelation of great import. As long as someone somewhere is telling a story, he decides, the universe will go on existing. I feel that Gilliam believes that, right down to the core of his artistic soul, for his films not only feed the imagination, but in their strange journeys and bizarre tangents, in their grimy grounded connection between reality and fantasy, they spin out whole worlds that are conjured from that most wonderfully strange location: the human mind.

Parnassus is on a journey to prove to the Devil that the power of the human imagination has not been dulled by modernity and so he travels in a ramshackle horse-drawn cart that unfolds into his Imaginarium, a scruffy stage upon which he and his band of performers try to enchant customers with their invitation to pretend. But of course, it is not all pretend, for Doctor Parnassus has a portal in the form of a false mirror that, when stepped through while he is in a trance, takes people right into the depths of their imaginations, forming a world just for them. These are incredible special-effects fantasias with looming, giant props, vast, gaudily colored landscapes, and unpredictably shifting circumstances. One elegantly dressed lady imagines a world with large, elegant shoes dotting the embankments of a tranquil river. Of course, the Devil will tempt those in this strange world, but if their imagination stays pure, Parnassus is closer to winning his wager.

The crew of the Imaginarium is an entertaining bunch. The coach driver is a sarcastic midget (Vern Troyer). The ringmaster (Andrew Garfield) is a bumbling runaway, hopelessly in love with the fourth member of the ensemble, Parnassus’s daughter (Lily Cole). Garfield takes what could have been one-note and makes it something a little greater and Cole, for her part, gives a soulful and earthy performance with the ability to suggest great depths in her big eyes. The four of them make a strange group, stranger still when their tattered cart opens up in front of a bar or in the parking lot of a hardware store. They’re always uninvited, almost always unwelcome, and urgency is closing in. You see, as part of Parnassus’s Faustian bargain, he had to make some dark promises for the future of his daughter if he failed to win over enough souls by the time she turned sixteen. Her sixteenth birthday is in three days.

But now I’ve gotten carried away telling you what the film’s about instead of how it’s about it. This is just the type of movie that’s so thrillingly complex in its fantastical elements that I feel I could explain it for hours and never get to the entirety of its wonder and detail. And I haven’t even gotten to the complication that truly kick-starts the plot. It’s the element of the film that has received the most press: the character played by Heath Ledger. It’s a charming performance but there are several moments when there is an uncomfortable subtext hanging about, a deep sadness that wouldn’t have been as deep if Ledger were still alive. And yet, his death forced Gilliam to greater heights of invention as there was work left unfinished when the unfortunate incident occurred. The scenes that find Ledger on the other side of the mirror had yet to be filmed and so Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell play the character in the most fantastical moments. It makes perfect sense and Gilliam even manages to make the shape shifting resonate thematically, illuminating the character in ways more superficial and yet deeper still.

But what role does Ledger play in the plot? I’d rather let you find out, just as I won’t spoil any more of the complications, the stunning effects, hilarious sight gags, or the jaw-dropping moments of awe. This may be Gilliam’s finest accomplishment, may be better than Time Bandits, may be better than Brazil. (But then, all Gilliam films need time to settle past their immediate impact). Here is a movie that reflects in every aspect the vision and worldview of its maker, a handcrafted testament to imagination in every frame. In the character of Parnassus – doomed to walk the earth forever as those around him tire of his stories and find no need for his techniques of entertaining – is an astute reflection of Gilliam himself, a filmmaker who started so promisingly and yet has been thwarted by studio meddling and unforeseeable complications at nearly every turn. Yet Gilliam, like Parnassus, thrives when he is in his element, growing close to the height of his powers.

And yet, the film is still a bit of a mess, wobbly at first and often confused. It’s marvelously complicated fantasy occasionally works as a detriment as the film threatens to collapse under its obfuscation. Still, though, Gilliam manages to pull it together, creating a weird and wonderful film, continually surprising and more than a little moving.