Space Princess Inherits Earth From Self: China in Awe

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I saw a movie quite recently that has affected me, deeply. Which is to say, I found it painful to watch.

Up until this point I had been under the impression that the singular worst modern movie to date was Green Lantern, which begins with an entitled, irresponsible and incompetent protagonist  who ends the movie as an entitled, irresponsible and incompetent protagonist with a great deal of power incomprehensibly left in their hands.

Green power.

Over the course of that movie he womanizes, gets his hardworking colleagues fired through his own incompetence, and quite likely murders them with his newfound powers when they, with humble mundane fists, make an effort to register their displeasure with the financial crisis he landed them and their families in.

The 'dickheads' mentioned in this.

It's a fairly loathsome film, filled with tedious tropes where you are obligated to cheer for the pretty people and hate the ugly people in willful ignorance of their other qualities and failings and generally left me resentful of the time irrevocably lost in watching it... and yet it has been eclipsed. Utterly eclipsed.

The Wachowski siblings have created, to steal the throne, Jupiter Ascending.

I had, in a situation I did not anticipate, needed to choose between it and the eugenics experiment movie Insurgent. Regrettably on the logic that at least Jupiter Ascending would be a self-contained story, I chose it.

A horrible mistake.

One of many made in or in the vicinity of this film.

For people who strictly value flashy CGI and stunt photography- the film has redeeming value- but is best, then, watched on mute with subtitles turned off. Paying any attention to the story is only going to bring you pain and disappointment.

Everything about the writing is so lazy and terribly absurd that comedians and parodies have been hard pressed to come up with anything sillier. Honest Trailers gave up and simply elected to read off what happens in the film verbatim- I'll refer you to that later on.

The movie attempts to teach a few lessons, badly, a few of which are :

• Buying crap will make you happy.
• Ignorance is bliss.
• Competence is unnecessary when you're rich.

The last one, sadly, is true to a point- as this movie aptly demonstrates.

There is an attempt to sell the value of humility, but it falls flat when it is so painfully apparent the creators didn't have any to speak of and equate it solely with happily scrubbing toilets.

Justly, the movie has cratered in the United States. Unjustly, according to Business Insider, it's starting to earn some of it's 179,000,000 dollar budget back (not including promotional costs) in China where I can only assume it is the #1 Hit Comedy under the new title which translates roughly into "Star Doggy's Toilet Princess of Earth".

Other movies that did gangbusters in China where they otherwise bombed in the U.S.? Iron Man 3. Which might have been aptly retitled "Mr. Stark's Sad Wacky Fire People Adventure"

Not a favorite film either, admittedly, but once again the special effects are not to blame.

I digress. Without further ado, and to save you the pain should you feel tempted to watch the film- the Honest Trailer for Jupiter Ascending.

It is every bit that bad. The Trailer is vastly improved over the movie, most especially for being dramatically shorter. I am fairly certain Sean Bean's character, Stinger, didn't die in this film as a stipulation of Sean Bean who did not want his appearance in this film linked with his work in any other half-decent film any more than could absolutely bee helped.

Something is very wrong with a movie written in such a fashion that you find yourself not only wishing death on every last character in the movie but furthermore IF you somehow had your wish GRANTED... Everyone else in the movie's universe would be objectively better off.

Over the course of the movie you learn that the galaxy is ruled by Humanity- or rather elite Nobles called the Entitled- who have been seeding planets with human life only to come back and kill the entire population of those planets later in order to turn them into Elixirs of Youth for immortality, fun and profit.

If every character in Jupiter Ascending had died, three of these Entitled would have been killed- quite possibly saving untold worlds of humans from 'Harvesting'.

Instead, shallow caricature of a 'humble' new Entitled- the supposed protagonist- fails to kill any of them and relies on their new Entitled nature and 'legal' 'ownership' of the Earth and everyone in it to protect the Earth as she returns to cleaning toilets and using space roller skates to go flying with her newly re-winged wolf-boy Hero.

As opposed to, say, letting the world know of the horrible danger they're in and advancing Earth's technology to give it a fighting chance against the Entitled who, most certainly, are not going to abandon their efforts to 'harvest' the planet.

I'm fairly certain such a character will just liquefy enough people to undertake their own immortality the moment they find crows feet in the mirror. Then, you know, maybe just a few more for a bit of trade goods or to extend the lifespans of her friends and family. By the time they are a millenium old- a small fraction of the age of her peers in the fraternity of genocidal space cannibals- there is little reason to believe they'd be distinguishable from them.

Indeed, the world would have been better off if every last character in the movie had just... had a fatal brain stroke of the kind any audience member trying to SINCERELY MAKE SENSE of this movie risks.

Now that's one hell of a failure of writing.

Progress continues.