Jupiter Ascending
They seed the galaxy and harvest whole planets to create an immortality serum. Fantastic world concept … but a subpar story to make a movie about within that world.
Passengers had the possibility to be really creepy, I still liked it but without seeing Chris Pratts time alone first, we would have all been confused and on guard with Jennifer Lawrence.
I think it would have been a much better film if the audience had also been kept in the dark about him opening her pod as well. That way we can also go through the range of emotions with her at the same time when she finds out.
Just start the movie from her perspective. Pod opening and Pratt is already there. He tells her his pod just opened and he’s confused too. Then we get the whole “wandering the shipn for the first time” montage where they could drop subtle hints that it’s not actually his first time doing any of those things.
His character is absolutely a bad person, but it’s a situation we can sympathize with because being truly completely alone for any amount of time fucks with people badly. She has every right to hate him for the rest of their lives, but it turns out that if he hadn’t done what he did they all would have died because of the damaged engine or whatever it was (I can’t remember).
They could have made the movie much harder hitting and/or creepy for the first half, but they opted to try and make you sympathetic to his situation from the start.
It’s the movie that always pops into my head when thinking about wasted potential.
A few favorites:
- Constantine
- The Last Jedi
- Jupiter Ascending
- Minority Report
- Prometheus
- Valerian
- Logan’s Run
I’ll be that guy that enjoyed The Last Jedi explicitly because it was something different, and leaned into more of the mystical side of the force while on the “big screen.”
Edit and spoiler just in case
I just remembered the hyperspace “weapon” moment, and both how cool it was and how much it could affect the empire. They probably didn’t mean for it, but that you could effectively point and shoot a ship like that was an amazing usage.
In response to your spoiler:
I specifically didn’t like that scene because it’s a massive departure from the lore of all the other films. If they could just do that, why haven’t both sides been doing that all the time? Is it supposed to be that this group is the first group to try this, with the tech that has been around for at least a few centuries? If they had all died in the process I’d be more ok with that, although that also seems like a departure from how hyperspace works in the other films.
why haven’t both sides been doing that all the time?
I feel like this can at least be backed up. It should be ridiculously costly in terms of sheer resources and personnel, and therefore utterly foolish in 99% of scenarios.
We can posit that hyperspace generators should be expensive in terms of resources and credits, and should get exponentially more expensive as the ship size increases, so making “hyperspace warheads” should also be foolish…
But on the other hand, to take down something like the Death Star, I imagine such a maneuver would have seemed worth it!
I think that sums up why the last two sequel films bothered me so much: They went for emotional "woah!"s by pulling things out of nowhere unexpectedly…But then you think about it for 5 seconds and it all falls apart quick.
The Last Jedi was a good movie, it just wasn’t a good Star Wars movie.
