Sense8 Review: All for One

Sense8 is a befuddled web of narratives that’s just as hard to watch as it is to stop thinking about. In its grand ambition of a premise, it actually fails to go much farther than the idea stage and calls it quits just after qualifying as a show. But it weaves in such interesting and engaging moments and characters that you can’t quite dismiss it completely.

Coming from the Wachowskis of The Matrix fame and the infamy of just about everything else they’ve done, it’s safe to say that the announcement of this Netflix original garnered a tepid response at best. Just as they’ve always done, though, they cook up one hell of a pitch.

In Sense8, eight strangers from around the world are mysteriously tied together by seemingly supernatural means. Slowly their past and present merge together to form their futures, taking their experiences and emotions and skills and blending them all together. They are “sensates,” people born into their own respective network of other sensates that share their, well, everything.

It is fascinating, to be sure. Through each character, wholly different cultures and identities and struggles are represented. They are each thoroughly and impressively fleshed out with entire backstories that could span individual features just as well as they fill in their slots in the show.

For instance, there’s Nomi Marks (Jamie Clayton), a trans woman and former hacker and current political blogger. Not only is her current predicament lovingly crafted and intricate (perhaps informed by Lana Wachowski and Clayton’s own lives?) but you then get insight on her troubling past, all of which is simultaneously built alongside the overarching plot.

And there’s Riley Blue (Tuppence Middleton), an Icelandic DJ residing in London as she attempts to evade her past. Wolfgang Bogdanow (Max Riemelt) reveals his layers of loyalty and latent romanticism amidst his strangely dissociative behavior. Each main character is a deep and necessarily real one.

The problem is that they don’t do much besides that. With eight individuals to tend to across the 12 episodes, very often it feels like the narrative thread that ties them together is far too thin. (And we’ve already seen the “strangers connected” trope before.) Their individual stories offer a remarkable amount of depth but then when it comes to the season-wide antagonist and set of complications, it all come crumbling apart.

We don’t find out much about the villain other than he/they exist, nor do we learn much about why the sensates exist, much less the reason the bad guys want them dead. All the treachery is instead imbued into the isolated character stories which tend to tie in the other characters through happenstance and deus ex machina. It almost becomes a game during viewing of wondering how situations can be carefully constructed to require sensate intervention.

As real as the characters themselves are, the situations they find themselves in become all too predictable. Lito Rodriguez (Miguel Ángel Silvestre) is thrown into an especially trite arc despite being one of the more compelling sensates as a closeted movie star. And then the ones that fail to find maturity in their own stories are just confusing, like Will Gorski (Brian J. Smith) and a presumably unsolved murder form his past that doesn’t seem to involve him enough to matter.

This could be a problem of the writing. It seems like the show is more interested in telling you that it is poignant rather than being just that, almost as if in the writers room, they kept chopping out words until it felt mysterious enough to count as cerebral. And then too many oddly crafted sentences were left untouched. Especially when it comes to Nomi, it’s hard to not sigh and think to yourself that no one talks like that, like they’re constantly trying to impress James Lipton.

Many of the bits surrounding the core of the show, however, are rather impressive. The logistics, for example, of filming all these parallel scenes on location and effectively cutting them all together is awe-inspiring. And each scene is beautifully shot with clear framing and digestible movement. All that practice with the action of the Matrix movies has paid off.

The editing is simply admirable as well. The story (and stories) move so slow and meander between nowhere and the middle of it but with the cuts moving between locations and characters with slick transitions makes it all look and feel like a much faster show. It’s almost enough to keep you awake for all of it.

Perhaps they fell into a trap of making a play of the word “sensate.” At times, the attempts for resonance is far more laughable than potent. There is an—ahem—”origin” montage that starts out relevant and points toward emotional but by the fourth sensate and what feels like its tenth minute, it’s hard not to roll your eyes and laugh.

It’s obvious the Wachowskis have a lot of stories to tell, each one seemingly more interesting and gripping than the last. They certainly have the sense of grandeur to do so. I just can’t wait for when they finally finish one.

Final Score: 6 out of 10

Jupiter Ascending Review: A Descent

What an indecipherable mess. There’s a lot of say about Jupiter Ascending, the Wachowskis’ latest cinematic endeavor, but most of those things are questions, and none of them helpful. There are no critical inquiries to be made except for one: why?

Let’s back this intergalactic bus up first. The bulk of the movie centers around Mila Kunis’ Jupiter Jones, a down-on-her-luck woman working maid jobs in Chicago and living in a nigh totalitarian household with her mother. One day, Channing Tatum’s Caine Wise, a half-wolf ex-military warrior, shows up and whisks her away to reveal her extraterrestrial destiny.

That, unfortunately, is where the train begins to derail. The signs were there: delayed from summer to February, inscrutable trailers, and fuzzy marketing. But watching this menagerie of befuddled ideas unfold before you is almost unbelievable. It’s certainly not abysmal in its ambition or scope, but it absolutely fails to congeal into anything remotely shapely.

A common lesson in sophisticated and effective storytelling is that is has to flow. This happened because that happened but then this happened, so therefore that happened. The hallmark of a child telling a story is something that skews closer to this happened and then this happened and then and then and then.

Once Jupiter Ascending hits about 20 minutes into its two-hour runtime, you realize its narrative edges dangerously close to the latter, and then five minutes later, it goes all the way over the cliff. Caine reveals to Jupiter that she’s of royal descent and that her children want to aggressively acquire and takeover her planetary assets, including Earth.

Except she’s not really their mother but also kind of is. And one of them wants to trick her while the other two trick each other. And there’s some convoluted and inconsistent caste system in place laid across the entirety of the spacey realm. And all of that feeds into some serious Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace-like socio-politics.

It is exceptionally baffling in every possible regard. Even the parts that make relative sense like the utility of genetic splicing with Earth organisms and sweet anti-gravity boots eventually come under counterattack from the rest of the film. As more of these wrinkles inexplicably spring up and push back against the established order, you see a film cannibalize itself.

Do you remember the part of The Matrix when Neo meets the Oracle and she poses a brain-tickling question: would he still have broken the vase if she hadn’t said anything? You ask yourself the same question regarding the acting in Jupiter Ascending. Normally charismatic and engaging actors like Kunis and Tatum become as interesting as celery sitting on a bed of tofu. But is it their acting or the material? It’s hard to tell.

Then there’s Eddie Redmayne who plays the eldest of Jupiter’s greedy children (and undoubtedly the most pillow-lipped). To say he’s acting would be a stretch. It’s more like he happened to say some stuff while a camera was nearby. And whether that’s directed at Redmayne himself or the script is once more debatable.

Potentially conflated with the potency of the acting, the discrete problems with the characters are actually easily picked out among the wreckage. Jupiter, for example, should be the hero. She fulfills the archetypal bits of being pulled out of her daily life, thrust into a foreign world, and pointed down the path of ultimate victory. But somehow she becomes little more than a waif of little agency, being led and pushed around to someone else’s success.

At the very least, it’s possible to say that Jupiter Ascending is a good-looking film. It certainly bears enough color and spectacle to distract the eye from the intellectual failings of the story, but that road quickly runs out to a dead end cliff. The visuals of confounding architecture and alien design mix up into a wholly incomprehensible blend of overly familiar and impossibly unrelatable.

Allow me to address you directly now. In my first viewing of Jupiter Ascending, a literal half of the audience walked out. In the second viewing (I’m wary about being overly critical of films without proper examination), four of the five people around me fell asleep. The narrative is impenetrable, the visuals progressively numbing, and acting on par with lukewarm water. You probably shouldn’t Jupiter Ascending.

+ It’s super colorful and can be fun to look at every once in a while
– Impotent acting
– Unfathomable world and opaque plot
– Passive character arcs

Final Score: 2 out of 10