Jupiter Ascending and Harvesting the Most Precious Resource of all, Time

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON FEBRUARY 12, 2015

"Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry.  Right now, Balem is entitled to Earth.  Once you claim it, the Earth will belong to you."

- Kalique to Jupiter

Jupiter Ascending was not a good movie but it also wasn’t that bad either.  The visual effects were stunning but the plot, character development and interactions were more problematic.  The space opera is about a young woman named Jupiter, who’s a Russian immigrant house keeper in Chicago that scrubs a lot of toilets, and is brought into this intergalactic turf war over whether or not she is a gene-matched reincarnation of a royal queen of the universe.

Jupiter, with the help of Caine Wise, a human/wolf genetically engineered interplanetary warrior, discovers that she is in fact royalty.  She must then legally claim her royal position and what inheritance comes with it, namely possession of Earth.  When it is discovered that the matriarch of the House of Abrasax, which is the most powerful of all the alien dynasties, has died, her three children Balem, Kalique and Titus go to war over many years for the inheritance.  Then it becomes known that Jupiter has the same genetic signature as the matriarch of the House of Abrasax and is the rightful heir.  The matriarch’s three children all one way or another, want Jupiter to hand over her inheritance to them.  The more extreme case here is Balem who wants her dead so he can claim the inheritance.

Caine Wise with his pointy ears and Atomic Anti-Gravity boots that allow him to rollerblade in the sky and off building surfaces, comes to Earth to protect Jupiter so she can claim her royal position and reinstate him as a legionnaire, which is a mercenary-type organization that he was banished from for ripping out the throat of what's known as an Entitled, which is another way of saying privileged or elite.  Balem has put a bounty on Jupiter’s head, resulting in her and Caine being intercepted and attacked by interplanetary lizard hunters with wings, these little Gollum-like alien creatures that are able to shape shift into human form, and a number of other bounty hunters.  Caine and Jupiter fight off and evade a number of these unwanted forces until a couple of bounty hunters finally capture Jupiter and take her into space.

Jupiter is acknowledged as royalty and is helped to make it official by space military forces who wish for new representation, after fighting in a number of wars.  Jupiter is then captured by Kalique, daughter of Jupiter’s genetic signature which they call a Recurrence, and told of the great resource that is fought so hard for in space, which is - time.  Kalique demonstrates this by walking into a plasma pool as a woman that looks like she’s in her later forties, submerging herself and then exiting the same pool looking like a twenty year old woman, her age is actually over 14 millennia.  Jupiter is clearly amazed at this level of technology and is then rescued by Caine where she is taken again but this time to Kalique’s brother’s massive gold-plated ship.  There Jupiter is told about the harvesting of human beings into a youth serum that allows these well-to-do aliens to live forever.  She is told by Titus that many planets just like Earth are farms for the purposes of harvesting, once the humans on that planet reach their Darwinian state of perfection and have exhausted all their resources.

Jupiter Ascending is pretty silly throughout and there is zero chemistry between Jupiter and Caine, even though the story attempts to create a romance between them.  The real interesting part here is the extent that capitalism is willing to go so the filthy rich get to live forever.  This movie knocks that home in the clearest sense, if the oligarchy of this planet scientifically found a way to harvest the third world for their life force, would they do it?  They absolutely would within a fraction of a blink of an eye.  In the movie people are described in the form of a pyramid with the royalty on top where the people at the bottom are seen as mere cattle.

The movie is saturated with so much visual effects that it will make the average candy-junkie truly feel what a sugar rush is, but hidden beneath all the explosions and cheesy dialogue is a true commentary on the future of mankind in cautionary tale form.  This movie demonstrates the potential effects of capitalism, if technology allows it to exploit even more of this planet and its living organisms for profit.  The movie explores the extent of what ownership means to the elite as well as the poor people that inhabit the lands that are being bought up by corporations.

Jupiter Ascending is about the future of mankind after abandoning the socialist recommendations of Karl Marx, where the fruits of industry must be shared for mankind to prosper.  Clearly that project was railroaded by the power structure because the world we live in today is cutthroat capitalistic economics, where the rich kill anything or anyone that even breathes near their piles upon piles of money.

Probably the greatest fallacy of not only human existence but all living organisms is that everything dies.  Human beings are in the unique and probably unfortunate position to be aware of their own mortality.  The fear of all our impending deaths has given rise to all manner of beliefs to distort that reality.  Everything from religions to reincarnation were invented by men as an illusory scapegoat from death.  Most of our existence is based on lies that can be traced back to that first major cover-up; we die and that’s it.  There’s no heaven for us to visit long dead loved ones while we sip red wine at a dinner banquet with God.  There’s no soul that lives on as our bodies die and are reincarnated into some other life form.  We die, like any other species on this planet.  We are only special because there isn’t anything else around that can tell us otherwise.  Every human on this planet was born into this lie and most believed it because the thought of death scares the hell out of them.  Not to mention its abstract, the very concept is almost incomprehensible because our only experience on this planet is living.  So life after death was invented to carry on that experience.
  

Jupiter Ascending is a cartoonish movie with big ideas. On its surface it wants us to have a fun and exciting movie going experience.  Beneath its gloss it wants us to feel that there's something wrong with the current system we are all living under. Governments and corporations are controlling our potential, they are controlling our minds ability to evaluate what's truly right or wrong for our well-being.  Instead our ability to evaluate has been appropriated for the purposes of mass consumption.  We are being lured away by fantasies of being famous and recognized and are severing ourselves from the very planet that we need to survive.  If this wasn't so incredibly pervasive and omnipresent it might be seen for what it truly is, sheer madness. 

In the ancient past the stars and the sun were gods, then the Greeks and the Romans anthropomorphized them into their gods which led polytheism to monotheism.  Today along with superheroes and celebrities, average people are scratching the eyes out of competitors in order to deify themselves into god-like status.  In our consumer society, we've become increasingly desperate to be seen and someone special but sadly, not with skills and talent.  We want the fast food route to greatness without all the work and struggle that Nietzsche said was required to overcome what holds us back.  The villains of Jupiter Ascending 'harvested' entire planets to benefit themselves both physiologically and financially, without any real afterthought of the millions of lives whose future potential was stolen from them. This is the unfortunate path we as a society are seeing ourselves on as corporations and governments harvest our wills to live outside their overpowering agendas.