51吃瓜网

There’s a scene in “Jupiter Ascending” where 14,000-year-old intergalactic noblewoman (or something like that) Kalique Abrasax passes on to earthling Jupiter Jones an important piece of wisdom: “Time,” she says, looking straight at the camera, “is the most precious commodity you have.”

It was, as Colonel Kurtz once described it, like I was shot with “a diamond bullet right through my forehead.” Here were filmmakers Lana and Andy Wachowski pretty much daring me to immediately leave the theater and go out and do something other than waste an additional hour of my life on the derivative rubbish of “Jupiter Ascending.”

Ah, the Wachowskis: I can’t think of any other directors who provoke such a wildly divergent love/hate response in me.

“The Matrix” was a rare modern sci-fi classic, subversive and inventive, and then they dropped the ball entirely in the sequels. “Speed Racer” was so moronic and hyperactively in-your-face that I actually did walk out on it. Then there was the wildly ambitious and cinematically pioneering “Cloud Atlas” — a film that left most audiences baffled. I suspected they would have to pull in the reins a bit after that one and deliver something more mainstream to keep their box-office cred alive, but not this. “Jupiter Ascending” is as kitsch and dull as Disney’s “John Carter.”

Mila Kunis plays Jupiter Jones, a Russian emigre who works in Chicago as a maid and, strangely enough, this is the second time within a year that the stunning Kunis has played a toilet cleaner. (The other was “Third Person.“) After some gray aliens attempt to terminate her, she’s rescued by Caine Wise (Channing Tatum) — a tattooed wolf-eared alien-angel-supersoldier on rocket-powered Rollerblades — who also has to save her from some bounty hunters.

It’s soon revealed that Jupiter Jones is a reincarnated intergalactic space princess, and that she’s the only one who can save Earth from the depredations of planetary harvester Balem Abrasax, a queeny Eddie Redmayne in a black cape.

With “Jupiter Ascending,” the Wachowskis are trying to fashion a classic pulp space opera in the tradition of “Flash Gordon” or “Star Wars,” but despite some great starship designs the story seems rather slapdash, and the chemistry between Tatum and Kunis is around the level of that between U.S. and Israeli leaders Obama and Netanyahu. Besides, haven’t we had enough of this “chosen one” nonsense? One plot shall rule them all, and barely a week goes by where we don’t get some variation on this in the latest action-fantasy flick — besides, the Wachowskis did it already in “The Matrix.”

Don’t they recall their last film, “Cloud Atlas,” which was based on almost exactly the opposite idea? You aren’t chosen; you make the choice.