Film Review: Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is just your average, everyday Russian immigrant trying to make a life for herself in America. She cleans apartments alongside her other family members, admires the jewelery and clothing of the people she works for, and plans to sell her eggs so that she can buy a telescope like the one her murdered English father (James D'Arcy) once owned. Unbeknownst to Jupiter, she is the heir to an intergalactic fortune, something which puts her squarely in the middle of a centuries-old rivalry between  Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Titus (Douglas Booth) and Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), three siblings from the Abraxis family, all of whom want to kidnap or kill Jupiter to advance their own agendas. Pursued by various alien bounty hunters, Jupiter falls under the protection of Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a disgraced space cop who also happens to be half-wolf. Together, Jupiter and Caine try to navigate the complex political maneuverings of the Abraxis, as well as the myriad explosions that keep interrupting their halting romance.

Film Review: Cloud Atlas (2012)

Ask anyone familiar with David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas about whether it can be turned into a film and they will tell you that it's "unadaptable." Not because of the story, which is actually quite linear, but because of the structure. Consisting of six separate yet subtly interconnected stories that span hundreds of years, from a nineteenth-century merchant ship to a far-flung futuristic wasteland, Mitchell cuts all but one story in half, then shifts from one story to the next as each reaches a cliffhanger, then returns to tell the second half of each story as the novel moves towards its end. (Or, to put it into numerical terms, the stories progress thusly: 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1.) It's a Russian doll of a novel in which each story contains the next, and as such would be dramatically frustrating in any medium.