Fever Film #1 - Jupiter Ascending and the Time Capital

I´m not going to lie. I didn’t watch Jupiter Ascending (2015, dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski) because I was curious to watch a devastating story told with minimal cinematic means (for that I could have just clicked on Mouchette. But I didn´t). I watched it because I had a fever and wanted to look at Channing Tatum with wolf ears.

My body wanted something silly and galactically mesmerizing. The film is bonkers; I’m not going to advocate for it. The critics are right about that: the plot is stitched together like bad fanfiction, the dialogue often sounds like it was written by real-life inept bureaucrats, and the tonal jumps - space opera, bureaucracy satire, casual romance - are muddy and incoherent.

But then there are these fragments that remind you that the Wachowskis are still talented big kids. The line that stayed with me:

“People are used to fighting for resources like oil, minerals, land. But when you have access to the vastness of space, you realize there’s only one resource worth fighting over: more time.”

In that moment, the entire baroque nonsense suddenly pokes a glitch in the matrix. The Abrasax family doesn’t just exploit humans; they harvest their lifetimes, distilling bodies into youth serum. Capitalism without the civilised mask: your years, your time turned into a luxury product.

I thought of Pierre Christin’s L’Ambassadeur des Ombres: the casual way human presence becomes just one negotiation among many in a multi-species economy. A tiny delegation from a not-very-important planet, lost in a bureaucracy that extends beyond imagination. Jupiter Ascending is a trashier cousin of that: Earth as one farm in a cosmic portfolio, our billions just biomass for some entitled dynasty’s skincare routine.

And I thought of Bill Viola’s Going Forth by Day: life as slow disaster, flood, fire, collapse, recorded with unbearable tenderness. In Viola’s work, time is thick, sacred, heavy. In Jupiter Ascending, time is something you can bottle and sell.

So many times, sitting helpless through viciously meandering school meetings, I almost feel the irreversible erosion of our limited time here on Earth. I think of our 17-year-olds trading their own time for grades, deadlines, “Abi averages”. In school, we behave as if time were an infinite, cheap resource: ‘You’ll have plenty of time to catch up,’ ‘You can make that up next term,’ ‘You’re still young.’ And as adults, we often can’t even see the goal of a discussion together, let alone commit to a solution, as if time were not, in fact, a finite common fund.

None of us gets bottles of extra time. There is no youth serum for the ones who are burned out at 18 or purposeless at 60.

At the end of the film, Jupiter refuses the cosmic throne and goes back to cleaning toilets in Chicago. The script wants that to be a gesture of humility (an anti-fairy-tale maybe?).

I don’t know if that’s heroic or depressing.

I do know this: in a universe that is happy to liquefy your time and sell it back to you as anti-aging cream or “professional development”, the most radical thing might be to become very stubborn about where your hours go.

Even if it’s just one sick afternoon, spent on a ridiculous space movie and a thought that refuses to leave.