melannen | jupiter ascending

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jupiter ascending

So I went to see Jupiter Ascending to celebrate Pi Day.

WHY DIDN'T THE INTERNET WARN ME THAT WAS A HARD SF MOVIE.

Like. Seriously. I got to the point where they explained why the extraterrestrial love interest looked like Channing Tatum and it made sense and did not throw out evolutionary science, and after that point that movie could have betrayed me a LOT and I would have forgiven it, BECAUSE DO YOU KNOW HOW RARE THAT IS, and then it continued to BE SCIENCE-BASED and NOT BETRAY ITS OWN WORLDBUILDING.

DO YOU KNOW HOW RARE IT IS FOR AN SF MOVIE TO NEVER BETRAY ITS OWN WORLDBUILDING AND STICK TO 100% HARD SF CONCEPTS? THAT MOVIE TOOK TWO HARD SCIENCE IDEAS, "GENETIC ENGINEERING IS A THING" AND "SPACE IS REALLY REALLY BIG" AND THEN JUST LET THAT BUILD TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION. IT WAS BETTER HARD SF THAN GRAVITY OMG.

yeah yeah sexy wolf-men with gravity boots whatever but OMG SCIENCE. SHE IS THE CHOSEN ONE JUST BECAUSE THE MATHS WORK OUT THAT EVENTUALLY THERE WOULD HAVE TO BE A CHOSEN ONE BECAUSE WHEN THE NUMBERS GET THAT BIG EVERYTHING HAPPENS. MATH.

There are a bunch of ways I just expect a movie to betray me eventually and watching it is sort of like just counting down until the inevitable betrayal and this movie kept NOT DOING THAT. The internet had warned me about most of them so I was prepared to maybe not be betrayed in the standard ways? BUT NOBODY WARNED ME ABOUT THE SCIENCE. NOBODY WARNED ME THAT THIS WAS A REALLY SMART MOVIE BY PEOPLE WHO REALLY LOVE THE "SCIENCE" IN SF AND TRUST THE AUDIENCE TO ALSO BE SMART. WHY DID YOU NOT WARN ME.

that was a really good choice to celebrate pi day.

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...I need to see this movie.

...it is no longer in my local theater WHY.

They made fun of astrology! But in a kind way! It was great.

...it is probably no longer in your local theater because I waited until I could see it at the cheap second-run place before I went. *whistles innocently*

Edited 2015-03-15 01:35 (UTC)

...tell us how you really feel?

<_< sorry was I a bit enthusiastic but seriously they explained why the aliens are human in a way that works with science and did it in two lines? it's that easy! and nobody else ever bothers.

Oh my god oh my god are you a person who understands the bees recognizing royalty thing??? Everyone makes noise about how the bee thing was stupid and random and inexplicable and I've been going NOOOOO about it forever, because to me it was the really big, "First you thought your world was being invaded by weirdness, but now bees recognize royalty and you realize your world was weird all along."

I just. I love this movie and I love how smart it is. I love it so much. And half its fans trash talk it and it makes me sad.

He didn't say bees recognize royalty! He said 'bees were made to recognize royalty'. (or something like that-the point is he implied intentionality). Right after he finished explaining that earth has been terraformed specifically for the purposes of the royal family! Why would't they seed it with various species that are engineered to detect their genetics and make them seen like Gods? The internet have me the impression it was just 'bees have queens! Magic!' But no they explained it in the frame of already established advanced science! So great. So classic hard SF. And, like you said, in a way that emphasizes right when they needed it JUST how much was really out there.

Edited 2015-03-15 13:34 (UTC)

Yes! I mean, it's wacky and ridiculous, and I admit I expected bees to be more of a consistent plot thread through the thing, but it's perfectly in keeping with the rest of the worldbuilding. It's totally a hard SF space opera movie, just with the wish-fulfillment and sparkly trappings running along different lines than what one usually gets. Which, of course, is a large part of the delight of it.

Yeah plot threads aren't really a thing in that movie, it's more.. glimpses of a tapestry. But I kind of liked that clearly everybody from the skeevy cousin to Terry Gilliam had their own story going on that Jupiter's wasn't really all that relevant to. Stories that tie all the plots threads up into a neat pattern are fun, but sometimes it's nice to have one that just feels BIG, too.

And delightful!

i haven't seen the movie (yet), but all the confusion over the bees has puzzled me mightily, because bees are a big trope associated with Queen Victoria in Victorian pop culture - she's the honey-sweet queen of the industrious empire/hive, Ruskin's busy tying gardens to femininity to queening. the Wachowskis playing with the trope makes total sense.

I think a lot of the bogglement is they don't actually do much with it? Like, literally, Sean Bee says "Bees were designed to recognize royalty!" and then we move on.

Which is the kind of thing this movies does a lot and I LOVE it.

Okay, I don't recall any 'Channing Tatum is an alien' explanation line specifically, but I came out with a definite idea that splices were humans with eg wolfy dna added to them? So technically, not aliens but more of a human-made artificial sub-species? So I was thinking less non-human-alien and more enhanced-human extra-terrestrial.

But if I missed a detail please do tell me, because I can talk about that movie approximately forever, with it's female gaze, and this is what female-centric sci-fi tropes would look like.

[Oh, let me quickly yell about male (& some female) reviewers missing the point by MILES, because female-centric emerging mythos (Brave, Frozen, Alien) = different & new cinematic revolution (for women!), not an incompetent bad & wrong failed attempt at trad male-centric sci-fi, or patriarchal chick-flick romance. (Channing Tatum is NOT the hero! Mila is NOT the love interest! It is NOT Cinderella-in-space!) Aaaargh!]

This film is BEAUTIFUL and I LOVE IT for trying to do something so new and still revolutionary. It's BETTER than Alien, because Jupiter wasn't written as a male character then cast as a woman, she was always female! And a POC, kind of! And lower-class and PROUD of it; like, she didn't like the work, but when she was literally offered the universe, her reaction was a mature and properly wary '...what's the catch?' and hen she refused the poisoned apple! And all her choices were about protecting her people from these dangerous space criminals, even the pretty, charming ones. And co-made by a woman! YAY!

Jupiter made me want the canon het pairing, and made me realise again that I slash in part because standard canon and tropes are so sexist, frustrating, and rage-inducing. Jupiter? I'm THERE, instantly, sold on it, no problems. (This must be what it's like to watch cinema as a white dude; I want more of it!) Also, I need a Jupiter icon. *goes to make some*

I wasn't so much referring to the wolf-hybrid thing (you have advanced gengineering of course you would make buff shirtless wolfboys- after all you're only human. That doesn't even need explaining! I appreciate that they didn't bother. nobody ever bothers to explain sexy slavegirls after all.)

It's the 'only human' thing that needs explaining. Because there is absolutely no reason people who didn't evolve on earth should even be vaguely humanoid, much less genetically compatible. Usually writers either ignore it (which is okay if you're not going for hard SF) or mutter something about convergent evolution (which might explain 'generally humanoid'. But not 'looks like channing tatum' - look at a thylacine picture sometime, they're a great example of convergent with wolves, but while generally wolf-ish, it's in a very uncanny valley way, and they even started on the same planet) OR 'the earth was seeded ages ago by a pre-existing humanoid race' (which is what, e.g., Star Trek went for.)

The problem with that one is that there is a TON of scientific evidence that humans evolved here on earth from a long line of well-described native earth creatures. So when you blithely go 'oh, well, extraterrestrial colonists' you're not just ignoring science, you're playing RIGHT into the hands of Creationists who really like having a population who is primed to go 'oh we can just ignore that human evolution is REALLY well documented because that's inconvenient for us.' And then Melannen gets pissed at you because you're not just ignoring science you are ACTIVELY playing onto the hands of the enemies of science whether you realize it or not.

And so many sf media lately have gone for that! and I was totally expecting it from JA! And Sean Beein' started to talk about how the human race isn't from earth and I braced myself! But clearly somebody on the writing team said 'look this is SF we can't just ignore the evolutionary record' so he was like 'yeah they found a planet with compatible biochem and then caused a targeted mass extinction and have spent hundreds of millions of years subtlely directing the evolution of the native mammals to make them match closely enough' and I was like OMG THEY WENT THERE WITH OUT INVALIDATING ALL OF PALEONTOLOGY and after that I would have forgiven them a LOT. But I mostly didn't have to!

Eta: and I actually think that's part of the whole 'this feels like every girl's first fanfic' thing? Because, like, idk, have you seen that tumblr post with the AO3 cap about 'everything here is made up except the bit about the newts that was all 100% accurate'? Because hell yes when we write our secret space princess fantasies we do our damn research.

Edited 2015-03-15 13:47 (UTC)

(you have advanced gengineering of course you would make buff shirtless wolfboys- after all you're only human. That doesn't even need explaining! I appreciate that they didn't bother. nobody ever bothers to explain sexy slavegirls after all

I'm dead of laughter. You're awesome.

I firmly believe that once we get the tech and legal/ethical framework to make transhumanism really viable, the first thing we will do is make catboys and catgirls and dog people. Seriously that does not need explaining, it's, like, fundamental deep down in the human psyche, one of the first known pieces of art is of a catboy.

Two things you wrote, and the movie has, that are made of awesome:
The bit about making buff shirtless wolfboys.
"Yeah they found a planet with compatible biochem and... OMG they went there without invalidating all of paleontology"

For-real hard SF is soooo rare in movies, and to have it include my favorite branch of science (biology) is making this fangirl weak.

Clearly nerdhusband and I must watch Jupiter Ascending on DVD.

I don't want to give the impression that this movie is all great bioscience and technical scematics - there's a lot of handwavium and technobabble and time given to explosions, and it's mostly hot people in awesome costumes being space-princess-adjacent - but! the handwavium and technobabble don't blatantly spit in the face of known fact! and it doesn't fall back on fluffy mystical stuff even once! Neither of those should be so rare in SF movies. And yet.

But at least it's not primarily mindless, science-less technobabble. And I have no problem with hotties in my science fiction. 8-D

People get so distracted by silly things (SPLICED WITH A BEEEEEEE) they forget that "hey, so we CAN do the thing, who wants to see what happens?" is true in science as well as in movie brainstorming and is totally the logical end result of high-end magitech. That's practically hard-SF psychology.

It was just FUN and not annoying. :D

Spliced with a bee is not silly it's brilliant! Bee-cause yes, science! (I was sad he didn't have compound eyes though. But gosh do I want to see him with his bee wings.)

I suspect he only didn't have compound eyes because relatively well-known actor, certainly most of the background splices were joyously embracing the hilarious aesthetic possibilities.

(Someone was headcanoning elsewhere I believe about Stinger's having bee-like pattern recognition powers, based on that one bit with the warhammers and his eyes going honeycombed, which would be quite neat, but I honestly think it's more about lulzy BEE WINGS.)

Please tell me they didn't actually show us the bee wings and I missed it. ): I was waiting for the bee wings.

But yeah I can think of all sorts of reasons why you'd want to splice bee traits into a special-forces soldier! Pattern-recognition, 3D navigation and direction-finding, cooperation and leadership, intuitive swarming, self-sacrifice and bravery, I could go on bees are so cool.

Not that I know of! But you have to think they'd be thinking about it!

There totally are, but you have to admit the movie gave us none of them, and it's possible it's supposed to be a slightly paranoid measure by the Entitled to assure that none of their genetic reincarnations go unnoticed in the areas the legion/marshalls are in charge of because bees can apparently sense royalty. Which is amazing plotbabble on its own, don't get me wrong.

Yes, this! I enjoyed this movie enough that I feel the need to emerge from my usual lurker state and agree with you, because this type of worldbuilding is what made it so cool.

My only complaint about the movie was that it would have been more awesome with more time on worldbuilding/character explanation and less time on blowing things up (which could mean shifting editing on what was already there but would be even better if it were part of a trilogy). Because then you could get more science, which usually isn't a plus in SF movies because the science is so bad. But with what science they did fit into the movie, I would believe that given more time, they would not have made the science worse.

And then we would have more time for bee wings.

I generally thing we need less time spent blowing things up in a movie. (Although on the other hand, the blowing-things-up sequences did give me a nice calm-down period where I could think things through and knew nothing important would happen onscreen, so I don't know, maybe if there were less boring explosive bits the pacing would feel too hectic.)

As long as you leave in all the antigravity rollerblades scenes. I would watch a whole movie that was just antigravity rollerblades.

You would definitely have to leave in the antigravity rollerblades. In fact, you could replace all the explosions with antigravity rollerblades & parkour stunts and it would be beyond awesome. The frantic explosions are just boring, in comparison.

your delight delights me :)

:) Everything is very delightful.

The amazing thing is that the universe is so big that it makes sense that's there's a protocol for reoccurences, because it's big enough that anything can happen MULTIPLE TIMES.

I really should have known you would enjoy the science in this movie and told you, sorry. BUT WASN'T THIS MOVIE AMAZING OMG

I am trying to do the math there and it's seeming pretty likely that it's not actually THAT mathematically possible - if every planet in the Milky Way had about 10 billion humans on it, the number of humans born in Seraphi's lifetime would be only about 10^20. Which seems like a lot, but you'd only need about 60 points of variability in the human genome before your odds were 1 in 10^20 of a recurrence - and there are a heck of a lot more than 60 genes that vary in humans - and your odds would drop fast after that.

(The odds that ANY recurrence would occur are a lot better than the odds that ONe PARTICULAR PERSON would recur, but I got the impression that there were few enough Entitled that the odds of any Entitled recurring at all would still be pretty damn low.)

But on the other hand one of the things you use to calculate this is the Poincare Recurrence Theorem, so somebody did their research. (And hey it got me attempting to figure out probability again! AND IT DIDN'T IGNORE HUMAN EVOLUTION. So I will still let it get away with a lot.)

To befair, we don't know (iirc) if they're limited to the Milky Way or have expanded further which might increase the odds of a recurrence. Also, I'm not sure why you're limiting yourself to within Seraphi's lifetime?

But yes I meant that there's a protocol for adding recurrences in wills because it's happened before, not specifically that Seraphi's recurrence had happened before.

I got the impression that the Entitled are few in proportion (say, 1%), but their absolute number would depend on how wide this universe is, which I don't think we've any info on.

I used Seraphi's lifetime just because it seemed like a reasonable benchmark; it doesn't matter that much because the math is... if you add another 10 billion galaxies, and another 10 billion years, you've still only got 10^40 humans to work with; but if you take it up to 1000 points of variability, you're at 10^300 odds of a recurrence - and humans very likely have millions of points of variability, at which point you're looking at trillions of universes, and billions more universes just to hold the computers that do the gene-matching.

So. IDK.

And if Entitled usually own at least one heavily inhabited planet (which seems likely?) you're looking at .000000001% or thereabout....

All the genetic engineering in the movie was so fascinating! I was especially wondering about the consequences for society: I understood that splices are created and then owned, but what about second-generation splices? Are there rules which splices are allowed to be able to procreate? Can splices be bought free, or are Caine and Stinger owned by the Legion? If there are free splices, and for several thousand years now, what's their standing in society? (And what about the androids?)

Also, what about children? How much control do parents have over the genes of their kids, I guess a lot. I'm curious what their opinion is on nature vs. nurture because I'm sure they did a lot of research on that.

So many cool questions :)

I loved all the questions it brought up about that! And especially regards Stinger and Kiza - what does it mean that a splice has a daughter on Earth, other than that he loves her? There are so many possibilities that the worlds allow. And I love that even though they clearly put thought into it, they didn't try to explain most of it, because they didn't need to.

(I think part of the reason I'm loving this so much is that it's so nice to get an SF movie fandom that's.. fresh. That isn't a sequel or remake or adaptation or reboot, that doesn't already have decades of related canon hanging off of it. Everything is questions left for us to answer for ourselves!)

I read an interview with Lana Wachowski where she said that in her opinion the reason why recently so many SF/fantasy movies are sequels/remakes/adaptions/reboots (she mentioned Avatar as a rare exception) is because people in general, including people in the movie industry, wanted more security after 9/11. I never thought about that connection, but it sounds plausible.

I have soo many questions about Kiza. I didn't pay much attention to her when watching the movie and I'm looking forward to seeing her on DVD.

That's an interesting thought! ...especially if you define "people" as "movie studios".

I have, for awhile now, thought about an informal "SF blockbuster movie index" comparing number of heroes who fight righteous rebellions vs. number of heroes who defend the status quo, as a sort of sign of how the political trends are going. I haven't run the numbers but anecdotally it seems to work...

That would be interesting, both for big SF movies and for big action movies in general.

May we link this at

metanews?

Uh, sure? Though I should note that this is not really well-thought-through meta, nor was it meant to be.

It works for us :)

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