Category Archives: Transhuman News

By Jane FreeburyFeb. 20, 2015, 9 p.m.

The Wachowskis' latest sci-fi adventure is a CGI feast, but it lacks compelling ideas.

JUPTER ASCENDING (M) General release

Half an hour in, after several close shaves with evil alien forces, Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) arrives at a farmhouse set in peaceful cornfields. The extraterrestrials in hot pursuit arrive soon after, but not before she hears that she is royalty, a challenge to the authority of those who want her dead, and destined for great things. Only the day before she was a cleaner, scrubbing toilets, so it seems there was something in the alignment of planets when she was born after all.

Jupiter Ascending is the latest from the Wachowskis, writer-director-producers Andy and Lana, whose Matrix trilogy was a landmark in its time. The Matrix concept was bold and the look original in a postmodern kind of way. The Wachowskis have the same sort of thing going on visually here, a collision of a high-tech futurism with aspects of our historical and mythological past - but not so much in the way of ideas to pin it all down.

Jupiter learns that the people of Earth are being systematically harvested and liquidated to create a serum in which alien overlords bathe regularly to maintain their smooth and toned youth. Keeping the ravages of age at bay is possible at 14,000 years of age, it seems. The exploitation of the masses, a familiar theme in sci-fi, has a nasty twist here.

That said, there is a wealth of detail in the Wachowskis' backstory, but it adds little persuasive drama to this narrative. A compilation of details that adds little to the eye-candy visuals, however, there are good actors at work here, wrestling with a woeful script.

Eddie Redmayne, so credible in The Theory of Everything and vying for an Oscar next week, may be hoping the judges won't have seen him here before they cast their vote. He has done the only thing he could with his part as Balem, rival to his siblings in the Abrasax royal family, and camped it up.

Terry Gilliam is clearly enjoying himself in his cameo. As Minister of Seals and Signets he is suitably Pythonesque and his scene in Jupiter's journey through bureaucratic absurdity tailor-made for the director of Brazil.

And Channing Tatum, of course. It has to be said that Jupiter is no superwoman. She is important to the future of the human race, but it's ex-military hunter Caine Wise (Tatum), her self-appointed guardian who keeps arriving in the nick of time in his flying boots to save her. His persistence can only be the work of a man in love, and so it is.

More here:
Jupiter Ascending review: Dramatic narrative lost in space

In the words of Paul Mason, its (still) kicking off everywhere. This frank diagnosis is applicable at every level of British societys layer cake. At the top, in the rarefied atmosphere of pre-election Westminster, the incumbent 2.5 party system has been pulled apart. Electorate faith wanes. And after scandals such as the HSBC tax avoidance debacle, in which a government trade minister appointed in 2010 once headed the bank, it's hardly surprising. The message is clear: politicians play by a different set of rules to everyone else.

From the tabloid press to Russell Brand to Thomas Piketty to everyone on Twitter, people are trying to make sense of our times. But beneath these manifestations of discontent, does the melancholy trickle down into Britains young cultural subterranea?

The reawakened popularity of grime a musical genre born out of the deprived boroughs of east London in the early noughties can offer insight into the mindset of urban young people and their place in the landscape of 21st-century disillusionment.

Grime was conceived shortly after the millennium. The New Labour government had introduced ASBOs and increased CCTV surveillance in its bid to be tough on the causes of crime, while elsewhere embracing big business, preaching a third-way, trickle-down economics. This pairing of policy seen by some as a mix ofharsh panopticism with neoliberal overconfidence resulted in an inequality best symbolised, as Dan Hancox has pointed out, by the juxtaposed architecture of east London: Canary Wharf versus the high-rise council estates of Bow E3.

This claustrophobia incubated the birth of a raw sound. Grime is the reaction of neglected youths peering up at the exclusive, unobtainable futurism of the city from positions of poverty. Doused in anti-establishment slang, typical lyrics relay the gritty aspects of an underclass preoccupied with park bench apathy, gang warfare and drug dealing. It is a middle finger up at disingenuous "hug-a-hoodie"conservatism a patronising philosophy that in essence still plagues politicians in their failed attempts to connect with the sceptical young voter.

Where in 2002/3 it started as an organic social reaction, grimes role as a unified voice of the oppressed became gradually less coherent. Despite a slowly accumulating nucleus of underground loyalists, the commercial success of a few artists brought a softened sound to the mainstream. In this respect, some aspects of the genres evolution are comparable to post-Olympics east London: gentrified and unrecognisable.

And yet last year there were claims of grimes return. It isnt that it went away, but an unprecedented chord of wider media appreciation has now been struck. The sound has spread to Bristol and Birmingham, while a moody instrumental style develops alongside the new generation of angry, punchy MCs. This versatility means music fans at large the technologically empowered Spotify generation are listening,not just the teenagers at the back of the nightbus. Unlike ever before, a Shoreditch art gallery is a reasonable venue for a grime show. The squeezed middle, seeking cultural expression, is starting to understand grimes raw charm.

After all, the coalition governments policy of austerity has affected multiple levels of the electorate. As the 2011 riots hinted, urban young people in particular are still frustrated. Not interested in voting and thus ignored by election manifesto policy; facing housing crises and zero-hour contracts; locked out of the top city jobs and positions of influence in pop culture unless born into the privately schooled 7 per cent: a voice of expression has to come from somewhere. And this time around, with post-financial crisis awareness, more people not solely the black working class of east London share grimes persistent despair about the unjust trappings of British society.

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Young people are still frustrated but the genre's revival shows a universal urban discontent.