After discussing sexism in the refugee crisis, the Church, and financial systems, she went on to criticize her own industry for its deplorable lack of female film critics.
This is why a perfectly reasonable action/adventure/fantasy film like Jupiter Ascending gets panned as ‘garbage’ and we have to all pretend to like it because it’s glittery trash and say it’s bad- the film wasn’t bad, for an action film (of which I have seen many worse ones with male leads who are considered fair-to-good by most people!) it was rather well put together- not surprising in a lot of ways but beautiful and well put together without any massive plotholes to my recollection- But no, I have to laugh and pretend to like it ironically because it’s made with a female power fantasy rather than a male one, which automatically makes it bad somehow for no real reason whatsoever. Yeah.
Thank you for this commentary. The more I contemplate it, the more angry I get about how Jupiter Ascending has been treated. Most of the defences of Jupiter Ascending contemporary with its release took the “trash” angle, basically arguing that it was total garbage but entertaining garbage (the Mary Sue review is the quintessential example of this). Most of these kinds of defences came from women who were at pains to distance themselves from any suggestion that the movie had actual merit or substance.
Very recently, I came across a comment from someone saying that they loved the movie and had seen it twenty times. This show of enthusiasm and support was quickly followed up by a series of statements stressing how “horrible” and objectively awful Jupiter Ascending is. Almost no reasons for why it was awful were given, with its terribleness being treated as a pre-ordained fact. While I absolutely understand people viewing movies critically and acknowledging their flaws (that’s how people should approach cinema, imo), I do not understand how someone can both claim to genuinely love and enjoy a movie and, at the same time, deem it terrible.
Upon reflection, I can’t help but feel that people have become afraid of diverging from the mighty consensus, embodied as it is by aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes (where Jupiter Ascending is languishing with a 26% average). We have a loud commentator culture, which you’d think would introduce a broad spectrum of opinions and tastes, but it’s surprising and disheartening to realise how often commentators merely repeat each other and simply magnify pre-existing opinions. Virtually every ‘bad movie’ podcast/web series you could care to name (Nostalgia Critic, Blockbuster Buster, HDTGM, YMS, Cinema Sims, Honest Trailers, etc. – all exclusively male voices, incidentally) has done a Jupiter Ascending episode, with the same tired and generally unfair criticisms being trotted out time after time (the claims that Jupiter Ascending ‘stole’ conceits and visuals from other movies are particularly lazy and commonplace, and are particularly easy to tear down).
Because influential figures – be they trade reviewers or highly subscribed web personalities – are constantly transmitting the message that Jupiter Ascending is a cinematic atrocity, people who like or even love it feel that they have to qualify their enjoyment by endlessly re-iterating how bad the film is. This kind of culture is wrong, frustrating and disheartening, and I’m glad that Meryl Streep was brave enough to take a stand and stress how worrying it is that our collective judgements of movies are heavily dominated by male perspectives.
fearlessstateofmind backup 