Jupiter

Sorry for letting my loyal readers down – however many of you might be out there.  Work this week kept me not only busy but uninspired, until now.  Our fifth and largest planet, Jupiter, provides the muse for a book and two movies.

First off, Jupiter is planet #5.   It’s the largest planet, has a big red spot (a storm which has been going on for hundreds of years) and 16 moons of various sizes.   It’s visible in the sky, but just as a dot.  With a telescope it can be seen a little better.  Pioneer (1973 & 74), Voyager (1979) passed by and took some awesome pictures, which they immediately posted to Instagram; the Galileo probe orbited the planet for 7 years starting in 1995.  It’s a big ball of gas (aka “gas giant”, like Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) with a small core of rock and ice.  It has 1321 times the volume of Earth, but is only 318 times as massive – presumably all that gas doesn’t weigh much.  The largest moons are Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa.  It also has rings, but unlike Saturn’s, they aren’t nearly as visible, so we treat them as if they’re not there.   Sorry.

Jupiter Ascending.   Given the negative hype and bad reviews this film got, it’s tempting to call it “Stupider Ascending”, but it’s not total crap.  It is good eye candy, particularly Mila Kunis.  I suppose the ladies might be more inclined to admire Channing Tatum, even with elf ears.  Anyhow.

   Kunis plays a Russian girl.  Not much a stretch for a Ukrainian.  Well, she’s an alien queen who scrubs toilets, until Caine Wise (Tatum) appears out of nowhere, rescues her from aliens, and takes her back to ….somewhere else.  She’s revealed to be royalty, but the plot to return her back to Jupiter has some nasty ulterior motives behind it.   It played like a movie based on book written by Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games) but was actually an original story by the Watchowski clan, who gave us one excellent Matrix film and two less impressive sequels; when you finally learn the nasty secret these near immortal aliens hide for their longevity, the Matrix angle, recycled here, will be a little more obvious.   As with those, the formula appears to be, “let’s dazzle them with graphics and visuals and hope the audience is too stoned to care that the story sucks.”  Perhaps the best use of the movie is just to watch it with the sound off, ignore the story, and enjoy the visuals.   A good plan, except that not all of us are stoners.

2010: Odyssey Two.  Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001, actually wrote a sequel, which follows up from the prior story.  Moreover, they made it into a movie, and thankfully did NOT use Stanley Kubrick this time.   The story makes sense, as does the movie.  While the movie left out a few items, it’s essentially faithful to the book. 

                Here, Haywood (Roy Scheider) returns to Jupiter (note:  the movie version of 2001 changed Jupiter into Saturn) on a Russian spacecraft, the Leonov, with a Russian crew, except for another American (John Lithgow), and an Indian, Chandra (Bob Balaban – “cleavage!”).   HAL – the supposedly murderous computer of the prior ship, Discovery – is reactivated and this time around he’s OK, mainly because Chandra essentially becomes his best friend, a partnership the prior astronauts lacked.  Speaking of prior astronauts, Dave Bowman, the sole survivor (?) of the prior mission, is actually still around, but in a much different format.   Much strange stuff happens, with a spectacular finish, but neither Clarke nor the film ever take us away from sanity or coherence.   While I’d recommend reading the book in addition to, and not instead of, seeing the film, as Clarke’s writing is enjoyable in its own right, unlike 2001 you don’t have to have read the book to understand this movie.

                For those of you looking for good visuals of Jupiter, we have it here too - except here the plot is much more satisfying.