‘Jupiter Ascending’: Female-centric Fantasy That’s Not Quite Feminist

If you’re not on Tumblr, you might have entirely missed the existence of The Wachowskis’ space opera Jupiter Ascending. Bumped from last summer to a mercy-kill February release, it was panned by critics and ignored by audiences. Save the fannishly inclined, largely female Tumblr users who happen to populate my dashboard, who completely lost their minds over this movie. I blinked and missed its momentary theatrical release and had to wait for it on video to find out if it met the subculture hype. And I am here to report that Jupiter Ascending is a delightful cheesy sci-fi flick, if you’re into that sort of thing. And while it isn’t a feminist triumph in the way that Mad Max: Fury Road is (and even that movie’s feminism has been called into question), Jupiter Ascending is unusually suited to a female viewership, which is sadly still rather revolutionary, particularly for a genre flick.

Gavia Baker-Whitlaw’s Daily Dot piece “Why Women Love Jupiter Ascending“ notes that its story “is the precise gender-flipped equivalent of all those movies where some weak-chinned rando turns out to be the Chosen One” usually with a hyper-competent and hot “Strong Female Character” acting as his guide through his Newly Discovered Destiny.  In Jupiter Ascending, Mila Kunis’s Jupiter Jones is a mild-mannered housecleaner who discovers she is actually solar system royalty after Genetically Engineered Space Werewolf Channing Tatum rescues her from an alien attack. Jupiter finds that she is at the center of a war between three royal Jovian siblings (yes I just had to look up the demonym for Jupiter I love my life) who all seek to control Earth and its seven billion harvestable humans so they can rejuvenate their youth by bathing in Soylent Green Espom Salts. She has a claim to Earth because she is the reincarnation of their mother and is also immune to bee stings. Or something. (The intricacies of the plot are not important, I only recount them here because they amuse me.)

So yes, Jupiter Ascending provides women and girls the “you’re secretly the most important person in the solar system” narrative that is so often granted to cishet white men, the demographic who already are treated as the most important people by virtue of the kyriarchy (you really need to be MORE important, cishet white dudes?). What’s missing, however, is the part where Jupiter taps into her secret set of special skills, as we see with our once-mundane male Chosen Ones from The Matrix‘s Neo to The Lego Movie‘s Emmett to Wanted‘s Whatever-James-McAvoy’s-character-was-named.  She never eclipses the badassness of her Trinity-equivalent, the aforementioned Genetically-Engineered Space Werewolf, Caine Wise (one of the great joys of the film is when people call him “Wise” while he’s doing foolishly reckless things. I’m not sure if that was intentional). Caine needs to rescue Jupiter throughout the film; his preferred style of rescue is to give her a piggyback ride while he zooms around on his gravity-defying space rollerblades. If all these absurd details haven’t convinced you to watch this movie  yet, I’m not sure what will. When she’s on her own, Jupiter’s “action” is largely about contract  law.

Because Jupiter’s secret importance doesn’t come with previously untapped hyper-competence or the unique importance of her particular abilities, it is simply a royal birthright. She’s more along the lines of The Princess Diaries‘ Mia Thermopolis than Neo. And women aren’t really wanting for “you are actually a princess!” narratives.  There are 30-odd Disney movies about that. Jupiter Ascending isn’t a power fantasy, it is a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

But it is still a fantasy for women in a big-budget sci fi movie, which is incredibly rare. Is that why Jupiter Ascending flopped at the box office, or at least why the studio lost confidence in it as a potential summer release? I suspect it has more to do with the current difficulty selling big movies without source material. If even the Wachowskis’ own Matrix trilogy (which provided the very namesake of Tasha Robinson’s Trinity Syndrome) couldn’t bring in a new era of original sci-fi blockbusters (the only two I can think of are Avatar and Pacific Rim), the failure of Jupiter Ascending seems foretold. So hopefully studios will focus on Jupiter Ascending‘s lack of source material rather than its female protagonist when they try to avoid making other movies that meet its fate. Then again, only basing movies on properties that already exist will perpetuate male-dominated stories.  So we’re kinda screwed either way, which isn’t an unfamiliar position for feminist film fans.

Jupiter Ascending might go on to be a cult classic, and if you like bizarre scifi you should help it get there. I didn’t even get into Academy Award Winner Eddie Redmayne’s astonishingly campy performance as Balem Abrasax, who prefers the cape-but-no-shirt look and only speaks in whispers and screams (in the alternate universe where Jupiter Ascending was released in Summer 2014, Michael Keaton gazes lovingly upon his Best Actor Oscar). While Jupiter Ascending deserves accolades for providing female-centric fantasy, it doesn’t go the distance to become a truly feminist film (it is certainly nine or ten notches below Mad Max: Fury Road, which doesn’t even meet the bar for some people). But while I can’t recommend Jupiter Ascending as a feminist film, I do recommend it as a fun film. They can’t all have Furiosa.

Robin Hitchcock is a Pittsburgh-based writer who sadly has been stung by bees.