There's too much in this hot (in the radioactive sense) mess to deal with in a single go, but one thing that needs to be addressed up front is the lauding of it as, at least, an original property -- not based on an existing book or TV series, no matter how evocative it is of so much previous genre films.
But in The Atlantic's Jupiter Ascending review comments, I saw several other people citing Cordwainer Smith -- and realized I wasn't the only one thinking "The underpeople!" when presented with an ostensibly-new space opera about a galaxy-spanning civilization with a corrupt aristocracy and oppressed animal-human hybrids.
But I'd been assuming that was a bit unfair, as anyone could come up with the idea as so many have in the past (as with the hawkmen and lionmen of the original Flash Gordon stories) and thus a coincidence rather than a direct borrowing, particularly since the Wachowskis have been open about their inspirations -- or rather, some of them, such as the French scifi artist Moebius, and The Wizard of Oz, although rather a peculiar take on that last, in my opinion.
However, it has been many long years since I last read any of Smith's Instrumentality of Man saga, and while I had vivid recollections of bits and pieces of it -- most particlarly "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" with its dog-human reincarnation of Jeanne d'Arc and her Gandhi-like nonviolent resistance movement of outcasts against the surreally-baroque and bored upper class of its galactic society -- I'd completely blanked on that overarching backstory that is the plot of Norstrilia.
Norstrilia, an incredibly wealthy planet of practically-immortal humans jealously guarding their elixir of life, derived from mutant sheep -- they started out as Australian colonists, of course! -- technically ruled by a long-lost Queen who may return someday, and in whose absence a mighty bureacracy runs things, including dealing with the problem of overpopulation that immortality causes by culling the "unfit" -- oh, and there's a Last/Lost Heir merchant-prince in hiding on Terra which is prime real estate and yes, the animal-human serfs and rebellions and legal shenanigans and...
So if Jupiter Ascending sounds like the Wachowskis put Norstrilia in a blender after switching some key plot points around with videotapes of the assembled library of all past science fiction films, that's because it's almost certainly exactly what they did.
(There's a lot of British author's Simon Green's mid-Nineties space saga in there too, the Deathstalker books, which read as if Green watched Blake's 7 reruns while doing LSD before he started typing, with futuristic vampires and werewolves and cyborgs and clones and bioengineered monsters of all kinds serving or rebelling against a baroquely-decadent and corrupt galactic aristocracy of "pure humans," complete with gladiatorial games taking place at the squalid feet of topless towers accessed by flying hoversleds....)
The fact that something in a genre resembles and even homages other things in the same or similar genres is not necessarily a bad thing -- as a lifelong fan of world literature, mythology, and live theatre it would be impossible to enjoy any of it if the sole or primary qualification for enjoyment was some phantasmic notion of "originality"-- but there is a difference between an entertainingly-fresh remix of familiar elements, well-assembled and presented, and a careless cut-and-paste job that feels thrown together, just as when considering a meal.
We don't want the hitherto-unseen combination of toothpaste-and-pesto pasta no matter how "original" it would be, but there is a sliding scale between a deservedly-untried culinary abomination of random items, an intriguing and unexpected combination of herbs and other ingredients, and the uninspired plopping-down of things taken from cans without any care or consideration for how these prefab parts can be improved upon.
But using very expensive plates and real silver cutlery lit by a crystal chandelier doesn't solve the problem of a main course of Spaghetti-Os and Saltine crackers, which is the cinematic equivalent of collaging a lot of random genre elements -- to the point where it's become a game for reviewers to try to list as many previous iterations for each one as possible -- into one half-baked Futurian casserole.
And taking all these strands so very obviously from Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia -- no, the source of the Elixir of Youth/Water of Life in Jupiter Ascending, exactly as in The Matrix, isn't literally sheep, but who'd deny that the theme of these films treats "the masses" as mere "sheeple" oblivious to their (our) fate? -- while proclaiming it something "original" seems profoundly dishonest. Was "Agent Smith" an earlier winking nod at the Instrumentality stories? One has to wonder, now.
It seems as though the Wachowskis were convinced, like more than one other screenwriter who believes themselves the cleverest and most erudite fan in the room, that nobody else out here has read older works of the genre. But one thing the internet long ago revealed, is that if you think you are the only person who has ever run across something, let alone a fan of it, you will swiftly find that You are not alone!
(Ever.)
So just because none of the names in Jupiter Ascending come directly from Marvel or DC or an old television series and the worldbuilding isn't exactly the same as the Instrumentality of Man -- which like most older science fiction posits Earth as the homeworld of a humanity that has pushed outwards to the stars, rather than the other way round, although the idea of a humanity originated or uplifted to sentience by older galactic civilizations was already venerable when Clarke's 2001 was finally filmed -- does not mean that there is anything original in a story that takes a "Lost Heir" plot that was covered in centuries' worth of dust when Geoffrey of Monmouth was buffing it up for his take on the Arthurian Mythos and redresses it from the wardrobe of costumes inexplicably unused in the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy for a direct restaging of The Princess Bride:
Two Black Swans -- was this deliberate?
Why yes, it would seem so!
but with an even more passive and hapless damsel at the centre of the conflict, apparently targeting those Team Jacob Twilight fans who thought Bella was too aggressivly-proactive in those movies, but can't handle the idea of an actual non-white person as her wolfish Knight in Black Leather--
However, if it gets more people to read "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" and other Cordwainer Smith classics as a side-effect, with all their terrible wonderfully-weirdly-chaotic poetry and off-beat ideas that all come down to Empathy is our only hope in the face of Eternal Night -- then some good will come out of all the waste, regardless.
(But it would have been so much nobler, so much better, if the Wachowskis had used their powers for Good, saying honourably and openly that they were inspired by the Instrumentality of Man saga and recommending that people rediscover those stories, instead of leaving it to us mere audience members to point out what they somehow managed to omit!)
The collected short fiction of Cordwainer Smith at Amazon
Norstrilia at Amazon
Oh, and one more thing, linking Jupiter Ascending with Cordwainer Smith by way of The Wizard of Oz -- the human viewpoint character through whose eyes we bear witness to the Underpeople's peaceful revolution is, very explicitly, hailed as a Witch in her introduction:
Elaine was a mistake. Her birth, her life, her career were all mistakes. The ruby was wrong. How could that have happened?
Go back to An-fang, the Peace Square at An-fang, the Beginning Place at An-fang, where all things start. Bright it was. Red Square, dead square, clear square, under a yellow sun.
This was Earth Original, Manhome itself, where Earthport thrusts its way up through hurricane clouds that are higher than the mountains.
An-fang was near a city, the only living city with a pre-atomic name. The lovely meaningless name was Meeya Meefla, where the lines of ancient roadways, untouched by a wheel for thousands of years, forever paralleled the warm, bright, clear beaches of the Old South East.
The headquarters of the People Programmer was at An-fang, and there the mistake happened:
A ruby trembled. Two tourmaline nets failed to rectify the laser beam. A diamond noted the error. Both the error and the correction went into the general computer.
The error assigned, on the general account of births for Fomalhaut III, the profession of “lay therapist, female, intuitive capacity for correction of human physiology with local resources.” On some of the early ships they used to call these people witch-women, because they worked unaccountable cures. For pioneer parties, these lay therapists were invaluable; in settled post-Riesmannian societies, they became an awful nuisance. Sickness disappeared with good conditions, accidents dwindled down to nothing, medical work became institutional.
An accidental witch, and one whose destiny is tied up with rubies -- was Smith himself alluding to Dorothy in his creation of Elaine the psychological healer? It is certainly possible, even as she assists and bears witness to a world of animal-people and jewels, which in turn evoke Oz. But I do not know if he ever said so directly, or if this was an accidental synergy of its own.
However, when 21st-century screenwriters tell a story so filled with the same elements as Smith's saga, and connect that story to Oz, we cannot ignore the similarities, nor what this connection proclaims.
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