I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction stories, which is my excuse for still watching science fiction movies good bad and indifferent of any era. Star Wars, The Matrix and Cloud Atlas were all reasonable science fiction films, not so this. It reminded me more of Dune, but it had elements within of Terminator, Phantom Menace, even a smattering of the Fifth Element and probably others too. And of course strip it right down to reveal Buster Crabbe's non-pretentious Flash Gordon. This was a film designed primarily to satisfy little girls' little princess wish fulfilment with Mila Kunis playing Dale, Channing Tatum as Pygar borrowed from Barbarella (cheating with rocket skates) and Eddie Redmayne as Ming.
Fed up lady toilet cleaner suddenly discovers that many swift monstrous things from the universe are out to kill her, others to marry her and kill her. Why? Because her recurrent DNA apparently makes her Her Majesty the Queen of Something but also the rightful owner of Earth which is shortly going to be harvested of its human population to ensure the longevity of the current owners. The interesting hypothesis presents itself: will the capitalist owners of the universe of the future value Time more than Money, and will they still be called capitalists? There are other interesting plot possibilities during the film, all sadly thrown away in the drive for debatable spectacle. The cgi cartoon gamer sequences take up the majority of the film but fail to impress – they're generally lame and taken at such a breakneck speed with conflagration in every pixel that it all ends up risibly incomprehensible. I couldn't laugh though in case I felt motion sick.
Kunis's character was named Jupiter Jones - which only made me wish Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews of the Three Investigators could've made an appearance to find out what was going on here. As usual the good point is that it kept a lot of people in a job but what a wasted opportunity to make something entertaining and worthy of its own longevity! At the end of the movie the owner of planet Earth is back to toilet cleaning, almost Whistling While She Worked and surely about to say There's No Place Like Home! I could've forgiven the waste of time if the end credits had rolled to Chicago My Kind Of Town. Colourful but utterly confusing and non-engaging.
Fed up lady toilet cleaner suddenly discovers that many swift monstrous things from the universe are out to kill her, others to marry her and kill her. Why? Because her recurrent DNA apparently makes her Her Majesty the Queen of Something but also the rightful owner of Earth which is shortly going to be harvested of its human population to ensure the longevity of the current owners. The interesting hypothesis presents itself: will the capitalist owners of the universe of the future value Time more than Money, and will they still be called capitalists? There are other interesting plot possibilities during the film, all sadly thrown away in the drive for debatable spectacle. The cgi cartoon gamer sequences take up the majority of the film but fail to impress – they're generally lame and taken at such a breakneck speed with conflagration in every pixel that it all ends up risibly incomprehensible. I couldn't laugh though in case I felt motion sick.
Kunis's character was named Jupiter Jones - which only made me wish Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews of the Three Investigators could've made an appearance to find out what was going on here. As usual the good point is that it kept a lot of people in a job but what a wasted opportunity to make something entertaining and worthy of its own longevity! At the end of the movie the owner of planet Earth is back to toilet cleaning, almost Whistling While She Worked and surely about to say There's No Place Like Home! I could've forgiven the waste of time if the end credits had rolled to Chicago My Kind Of Town. Colourful but utterly confusing and non-engaging.