'Jupiter Ascending' is a soupy cosmic fairy tale.

Byline: Jake Coyle

'Jupiter Ascending'

A Warner Bros. release

Rating: PG-13 for some violence, sequences of sci-fi action, some suggestive content and partial nudity

Running time: 2 hours, 7 minutes

Within the warped wardrobe of the Wachowskis' latest sci-fi extravaganza, "Jupiter Ascending,'' there are some fantastical feasts of intergalactic ridiculousness. Channing Tatum as a combination elf and speed skater. Space dinosaurs in leather jackets. A robed Eddie Redmayne as the universe's overload, who so gravely whispers his lines that you fear he is, for the length of the movie, being castrated just off camera. That, at least, would explain his sporadic shrieking.

Redmayne, who may be on the cusp of an Oscar for his more earthbound performance as Stephen Hawking, is the best and worst thing in a movie that rides the campy line of simultaneously great and terrible with intermittent success. For more than a decade now, writer-directors Lana and Andy Wachowski have capitalized on their "Matrix'' fame to conjure up mystical blockbusters of grandiose, garish style ("Cloud Atlas''), luring moviegoers who like bananas with their popcorn. Did I mention the space dinosaurs in leather jackets?

"Jupiter Ascending'' begins with the birth of a girl, Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), to Russian immigrants while midway across the Atlantic. Looking back from later on, she narrates that she was born an illegal alien, betwixt worlds. As the film stretches out into the cosmos, it fills its adventure with mutants and "splices'' who have genes of mixed species.

Tatum's Caine Wise is one such fusion. He's an elite soldier whose (literal) wings were clipped for a mysterious past incident. Made with part wolf blood, he has pointed ears and a blond goatee, neither of which makes him particularly easy to take seriously as a hero. Oh, and he has jet-propelled boots that he skates through the sky with: an extraterrestrial Apolo Ohno.

Jupiter lives as a cleaning lady with her humble family in Chicago, a regular existence shattered when spindly aliens show up and try to kill her. Caine comes to the rescue, an unfortunately repetitive occurrence in "Jupiter Ascending,'' in which Kunis' character is always in need of being swooped out of...