Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
- On a meta level, I just realized what this movie was. Think about it. The Wachowskis are massive anime fans. Ghost in the Shell was a major influence on The Matrix, while the elements of several cyberpunk series can be seen in the Na So Corpos scenes in Cloud Atlas. So now, they have a movie where an ordinary person for Earth who finds out that they are a crucial missing piece in interstellar politics, on which Earth barely registers as a blip. They must navigate through the interests of other parties while also working out their relationships with members of the opposite sex that want to both use them and protect them. Clearly, Jupiter Ascending is based loosely on Tenchi Muyo.
- Many viewers complain about the ending in which Jupiter goes back to cleaning toilets for a living, despite owning Earth. This makes sense when you realize that she could only live luxuriously by liquidating her assets, in other words killing the people of Earth. She's poor because she doesn't want to go through with the harvest.
- Why does Caine forgive Stinger's betrayal so quickly? Because, apart from needing his help, Caine is a Lycantant who genetically needs a pack, on a level deeper than simply love and companionship. Of course he understands that Stinger would do anything to save his daughter.
Fridge Humor
- Maximilian Jones suggests naming their daughter Jupiter, unwittingly implying that his very pregnant wife is carrying the largest planet in the solar system.
- Stinger mentions that the Abrasax were responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, but only seeded the Earth 100,000 years ago. The only logical conclusion? This was merely the most recent seeding, Earth has been harvested 649 previous times. The Earth's population is currently expected to max out at 10 Billion people. Assuming all other things remain equal, past harvests have murdered 6,490,000,000,000 people. For perspective, the count for the human population usually starts at about 50,000 BC. Between then and now approximately 1/60th that many people have ever lived.
- Some of the previously harvested may have left warning signs as to their fate.
- It is also mentioned that planets are harvested when they reach the point where they cannot naturally sustain any greater population. The implication being the population is doomed anyway, so it doesn't disrupt the greater universe any to pulp the lot of them. So (Earth) humanity is saved at the end of the film, only to die out with a whimper sometime in the near future.
- In the end, Earth is saved and Jupiter is a Queen Incognito who gets to float-skate across the Chicago skyline, safe in the knowledge that no one can harvest Earth as long as it belongs to her and her family. Let's just hope that she, and her cousins, breed like rabbits and have loads of descendants, because the minute their family dies out Earth is SCREWED.
- Her descendants could always donate eggs/sperm to reproduce even more effectively (so that even genes from fertile descendants that don't want to have children will be passed on)
- Jupiter owns Earth, and is protecting Earth... but apparently isn't doing anything to protect anyone else in the universe.
- This becomes Nightmare Fuel when you realize that the "family business" will probably keep going regardless of who is running it. The real kicker is that the Abrasax aren't the only ones making Recode, merely the largest.
- The Abrsax siblings are all varying degrees of fucked up, seemingly in relation to their ages. Titus is just an asshole, not that different to a spoiled brat one might encounter on Earth. Kalique deliberately turns a blind eye to where her immortality comes from, but seems otherwise stable. Balem seems to be less of a person and more a person-shaped jumble of mental problems- probably because he's the oldest. Kalique is 14,000 and already seems a little off, and Seraphi was mentioned to have gone crazy and become suicidal before she died. Balem presumably went insane from his unnaturally long life.
- While the ending seems to suggest that she has decided to let all of humanity live, the fact that she doesn't utilize any of the technological advancements she now has access to for anything except her own entertainment implies that she's keeping harvest open as an option. After all, she could easily keep every human she personally knows alive and liquidate the rest. Of course she will have to kill some time first, because her local factory was recently destroyed.
