February 7, 2015 -- This joyless, twisted tale of royal interstellar intrigue looks gorgeous on the screen, but the story stalls out and falls flat. The story gets tangled up in convoluted plot twists and half-revealed schemes which choke the life out of it.

I had hopes this would remind me more of “The Matrix” or even “Cloud Atlas,” but sadly, it fell far short those earlier films written and directed by the Wachowskis, Andy and Lana. It is a big, ambitious film. It looks great, with wonderful art direction and set design and elaborate computer generated vistas of futuristic architecture, vaguely reminiscent of the look of “Dune” (1984). This is a work of spectacular visual imagination.

At the center of the story is Jupiter Jones (played by Mila Kunis of “Oz the Great and Powerful”) a cleaner of toilets and owner of the planet earth. Jupiter is born with the same genetic code as an earlier member of a powerful interstellar family that owns populated planets whose humans are harvested to create a substance that is used to keep members of the royalty young forever. This is like being born into royalty, except that Jupiter is royalty not because of who her parents are, but because of her genetic profile.

Jupiter is targeted for death by a member of a rival family who wants the earth, and its billions of people, for himself. Just before she is executed, she is rescued by a genetically altered bounty hunter, Caine Wise (Channing Tatum of “Foxcatcher”) who has been hired to find her by another of these meddling royal families. Caine takes her to a remote rural house where his former fellow soldier, Stinger Apini (Sean Bean of “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief”) lives, and after pointless fighting about some old feud, they plot Jupiter's rescue.

One of the things that is missing in this story is the training montage where Jupiter learns to defend herself against these attacks. As a result of not learning to fight, she is a clueless victim for most of the film, getting pushed around by a bunch of scheming, wicked, powerful people and their henchmen, some of whom are reptilian. Jupiter is given a book which explains the rules of this deadly interstellar game in which she is a mere pawn. I think if I'd gotten to read that book maybe I would have had a better idea what was going on.

There is an attraction between Jupiter and Caine Wise, but it isn't all that convincing as a story device (in other words, zero romantic chemistry). There is finally a big showdown between Jupiter and the main villain. There is also a huge amount of destruction and lots of fighting between people and lizard creatures. Unfortunately, by then the story had lost headway in a maze of complications and plot fragments.

In one of the labored speeches leading up to this final battle, a character explains to Jupiter that the most important thing in the universe is time. After humans are processed, the resulting elixir gives those who can afford to benefit from it, just that, more time. I know what that means. I could feel precious time slipping away from me as I watched this film. It rates a C.

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