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Jupiter Ascending | 2015 | PG-13 | - 4.6.4
Sci-fi film about a housekeeper (Mila Kunis) on Earth, who learns from a planet-hopping warrior (Channing Tatum) that she is vital to universal life. She must journey beyond her solar system to meet her destiny and decide whether the status quo is worth maintaining. Also with Douglas Booth, Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Tuppence Middleton. Directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski. There are several lines of Russian and extraterrestrial languages with English subtitles. [2:07]
SEX/NUDITY 4 - In two scenes a man and woman kiss three times. A man kisses a woman's hand. A man and a woman in spacesuits hold hands outside a spaceship.
► A powerful alien humanoid is a playboy: he floats in a mist of sparkles in his room as a dozen women kiss his face and rub his shoulders and arms (their snug outfits reveal cleavage, midriff, and some bare legs). A woman looks at a shirtless man with a muscular chest and says, "He's well made." A female alien walks away from the camera, nude, into a pool of liquid that sparks electrically, and she comes out looking 20 years younger (please see the Substance Use category for more details); we see her back and buttocks. In a factory, human bodies float in stasis and we see bare abdomens, chests of indeterminate gender, sides and a few thighs; details are missing from the bodies, including faces, breasts/nipples, navels and genitalia (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details).
► A thin woman wearing a tight bra and skimpy panties looks in her clothes closet (we see moderate cleavage, her navel, lower buttocks and thighs). Dozens of women wear tops and gowns that reveal moderate cleavage and some tops are cut above the midriff (no belly buttons show). A woman wears a wide sequined bra top with a long formal skirt, revealing cleavage and midriff; one long gown also reveals the full bare leg of a woman from her ankle to the top of her thigh. Men and women wear form-fitting uniforms with a few arm cutouts filled in with mesh; men's outfits sometimes have chest-cutouts that show hair and nipples and the tights of men and women are snug.
► A woman asks a man, "Is there any part of you that wants to bite me?" and he says, "No. Well, maybe." A woman says that love is only a fetish for little girls. A woman says someone has a fetish for clothes.
► A husband rubs petroleum jelly over his pregnant wife's swollen belly and we see her navel (only her belly is exposed), and then kisses it three times; the camera cuts to a dark room where the woman is delivering a baby, sweating and screaming as other women help her (her long skirt is wet and a slimy newborn is revealed from under the skirt, covered in blood). A woman wears a knee-length hospital gown in an egg-donation clinic, but the procedure does not happen (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details).
VIOLENCE/GORE 6 - Men burst into a home, steal money and shoot a man sitting next to his pregnant wife; she screams and we see blood on his chest and abdomen as he lies on the floor with open eyes.
► Three extended fight scenes in space feature gigantic mother ships and dozens of smaller ships, blasting lasers and other weapons at one another; in one scene, the smaller ships are in the form of lobsters with moving claws that they smash into skyscrapers, breaking windows and some crash out of the shot with loud noises and flames while others return to a larger ship, which warps out of the area; one sequence shows many buildings in a large city ignite in flames, burn with smoke, crumble while some towers explode loudly and rebuild themselves immediately (a man says that aliens have always done this to cities). Transformer-like ships bombard a mother ship and its cathedral with laser cannon fire, after bursting through the energy of thousands of war-hammer blasts; arches fall, large holes explode into the walls and we see flames and smoke while a soldier at an altar tells a would-be political bride, "After the wedding, he [the groom] was going to kill you." Arches and pillars of a dark castle-ship crumble and fall under laser gun blasts, an attached factory ignites as we see flames and smoke from above and the entire complex explodes, filling the screen with fire and smoke.
► A woman fights with a humanoid including punching, kicking and body slams; the humanoid stabs at the woman's throat with a metal staff (no blood) and hits her with it several times as pillars and walls fall; the woman jumps away to a wall and then again to a platform and the humanoid catches up (he has a bloody lip) and slugs the woman as she drives her fingers into a bloody wound on his leg, he screams and falls off a crumbling wall and a soldier flies on rocket boots and catches the woman. A soldier fights dragon-men, shooting several dead with big scorch marks and driving a metal spike through the tail of one (without blood) and as the dragon chokes him with his tail and drops him to the floor, approaches and states, "You hurt me and I am going to make you regret it"; the soldier picks him up and body slams him through a glass floor, where the dragon-man hangs by the neck, presumably dead. A humanoid fights a woman and slaps her hard twice, drags her by her hair, then chokes he before she knees his groin and he falls while screaming; she asks why he killed his mother and he screams, "How dare you?" and slaps her again. Two men fistfight at a farmhouse, each punching the other loudly in the jaw and they scuffle and demolish the front porch railing. A man beats his nephew with a throw pillow dozens of hits, shouting at him about trying to force his cousin to sell her human eggs at a clinic (please see the Sex/Nudity category for more details).
► A cadre of dragon-men burst into a house, one dragon smells a woman and the group kidnaps all the family members; a woman slaps someone in the face, with a hard, loud slap as a soldier bursts in and tells his cohorts with him, "They're going to kill her."
► A war game with dragons appears on a video screen briefly and no one is playing it. A man uses a hologram iPad-type device and it explodes, making him yell and many aliens attack the house and two men inside use blaster rifles, blaster guns and fists to fight the attack; one attacker uses a large electronic Gatling gun and two others kidnap a teen girl and a woman, while one attacker dies after receiving a blaster scorch; one of the men from the house jumps onto the attacker's ship as it begins to take off and we see it make a crop circle in a cornfield.
► A humanoid pushes a button to reveal a woman's Earth family floating in stasis as a machine begins to cut into her mother and she screams, making it stop; she picks up a blaster and shoots his legs below the frame and he screams in pain, falling out of the shot and a soldier bursts in with a hand blaster, fires several times and pulls the woman out of the now-crumbling room. We see many humans floating in stasis as thick needles pierce their bodies on all sides, without blood. A dragon-man is sent into a torture machine where dozens of cutting instruments approach his face before he agrees to do as a humanoid bids. A woman points a huge handheld blaster at a man, but does not fire it.
► We hear that a man is a genetic defective and that he is half-albino, part wolf and part human, with pointed ears, and his lower jaw will not close completely (we see large, sharp canine teeth); we hear that he bit the throat out of a military leader and was court-martialed (we see scars on his back and round scars on his shoulder blades as we hear that his wings were cut off); we see him fly with long black wings in one scene, we see a large bloody wound on his side and a woman stops the flow of blood with pressure from a sanitary napkin in a car and as they reach a friend's house and the male friend sprays new skin onto the wound for instant healing.
► A woman wearing a long hospital gown in an egg-donation clinic lies on a table as manacles cuff her ankles and wrists and she receives anesthetic from a mask; she levitates, turns face down, and a nurse uses a handgun instrument to extract DNA from her neck as a doctor says, "Kill her"; a soldier wearing rocket boots that allow him to fly and skate bursts through the wall, shoots four aliens and rescues the woman. A powerful humanoid stops time in a flashback of women's clinic scene and walks into the frame, tearful as he looks at a woman levitating over a treatment table and a soldier blasting an alien, scorching and killing it. Four aliens lift a woman, she moans and passes out and they extract DNA from her neck, then drop her to the floor, where she comes to and remembers nothing. Hunters surround a man and a woman and take them to a ship where the man is lowered into a cylindrical cell about 4-feet in diameter; he tries, using his rocket boots, to cut through the top bars, but falls on his back and aliens send him into space (a spacesuit surrounds him and another ship picks him up and we hear his air just ran out).
► A man carrying a woman in his arms in the sky falls toward a moving train and soars higher into the sky as we see sparks fly. A man rides rocket shoes through all the scenes after leaving a craft he was piloting. An alien chatters his teeth in close-up in a vessel's cockpit and ejects out of the shot as his ship smashes through glass walls, slides with creaking metal and sparks and slams into an SUV (its alarm goes off).
► Many 12-foot tall dragon-men bellow in deep voices and a humanoid prince screams at them several times; he screams, "I create life" and whispers ..".and I destroy it" and then shouts, "Life is consumption." A man shouts at a woman not to back talk and women at a family dinner table shout at one another and yell over whether back talking is allowed.
► We hear that entire planets of humanoids are harvested to distill for youth serum for a man and a woman, and it's 100 people per cylinder (please see the Substance Use category for more details). A woman says that during a harvest, "I hear they feel no pain." In another scene, the man on the pavement says that a harvest is like butchering cattle. An alien princess shows an Earth woman a statue of the founding matriarch of the Universe, which looks just like the Earth woman, who looks shocked; the alien says that this is her mother, who lived to be 91,000 years old before being murdered for trying to stop humanoid harvests (mass murders) that prolonged the lives of the royals. An alien says that time is the resource of outer space and people will kill for more time to live. A woman says, "The more you care, the more the world finds ways to hurt you for it."
► Thousands of bees form a cloud around a woman, but do not sting her. A cadre of genetically engineered super hunters travel the universe. Genetically engineered people have a rectangular scarification on their necks that contain numbers and designs as a brand: A man and his daughter are each a human-bee splice; he once had wings and still has speed, and they live with thousands of bees in swarms and hives in and around their house. A woman is half-human, half-deer with long deer-like ears. Some women are bald and have jeweled or metal implants in their scalps or cheeks. An elderly man has a large magnifying glass built into his eye. Aliens include the traditional "grays" that can become invisible and have crooked teeth instead of just a mouth slit: Dragons growl, talk, walk upright and wear armor. Elephant people have short tusks. Reptilian people have slightly scaly facial skin. An albino has bruised and dirty cheeks and a prominent brow ridge. Androids have a mask that behaves as a smiling human face, but we can see gears in an opening beyond the mask, just before the wig that ends in a curlicue. One android sees his own face on another android and shudders. Soldiers wear faceplates and have arms that are short Gatling guns.
► A spaceship monitoring a falling castle waits until the last second to go to warp speed and we see the warping effect like a heat wave. A man with magic vision walks through glass without damaging it and flies a ship through a glass wall at a mother ship's docking area; in a few scenes, he and a woman ride light beams in the form of columns filled with sparkles, as if they were elevators. Toys and purses are seen strewn on the roadway of a desolate and empty city as papers drift in the breeze. An elderly accountant cranks on an ancient office machine, as it whirs loudly and sends out large sparks.
► A woman scrubs toilets several times, but we see no excretions or dirt.
LANGUAGE 4 - 1 possible muffled F-word, 9 scatological terms, 1 anatomical term, 11 mild obscenities, name-calling (Stalin, boogy coot, overpopulated cesspool, chicken, gullible), 11 stereotypical references to men, women, the rich, the poor, mercenary soldiers, housekeepers, gray aliens, bureaucrats, evil princes, Asian Indians, Russians, 1 religious profanity (GD), 15 religious exclamations (e.g. Oh My God, Holy [scatological term deleted], Oh God, I Pray Your Aim Is True).
SUBSTANCE USE - An alien sells youth serum stored in foot-long cylinders of glowing blue-white liquid, a woman walks into a tub of youth serum and comes out 20 years younger (please see the Sex/Nudity category for more details), a woman swallows a few pills to control the bowels during spacecraft liftoff (she is fine), we hear that a girl with bee DNA needs to drink special nectar when she is ill, a woman in a clinic receives anesthetic through a clear mask, and a man lying on a gurney has an IV line extending under armor on his arm. Decanters and jugs of amber and gold liquids on a table could be honey and/or alcoholic beverages, a man drinks a glass of wine at dinner and his date does not drink hers, men drink from beer bottles at two family dinners, and a woman drinks a short glass of amber fluid which may be an elixir used after age-regression.
DISCUSSION TOPICS - Riches, conspicuous consumption, the quest for youth, murder, greed, money, power, danger, courage, trust, values, commitment, love, relationships, family.
MESSAGE - A simple life is sometimes better than being royalty.
CAVEATS
Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.
We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.
Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.
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Become a member of our premium site for just $2/month & access advance reviews, without any ads, not a single one, ever. And you will be helping support our website & our efforts.
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We welcome suggestions & criticisms -- and we will accept compliments too. While we read all emails & try to reply we do not always manage to do so; be assured that we will not share your e-mail address.