Boys Go To Jupiter (2024 | US | 90 minutes | Julian Glander)
We see a group of kids hanging out on what turns out to be their Christmas break. One refuses to wear a shirt, another always dons a purple burglar beanie, a third is the pipsqueak of the crew and last is Billy 5000. Billy, a recent school drop out, seemingly adrift is chasing a dream of making five thousands bucks delivering food for Grubster before New Years with only his hoverboard and intense focus to get him there. Finding a financial glitch in his employer’s system, he’s making hand over fist when his focus cracks after delivering to an ex-schoolmate and crush Rozebud. She happens to be working at the local orange juice research facility run by her mother Dr Dolphin, but finds slacking off the best way to spend her time. When he parts ways with her, Billy pilfers more than just the experimental lemon he slipped in his bag on the way out, but also an alien shaped like a, and so dubbed, Donut. That’s when things get really weird, as Dr Dolphin threatens Billy with jail time, he grapples with what’s really important to him both personally and ethically and how to impress this new crush of his.
It takes a minute to adjust to Boys Go To Jupiter, kind of like when you’ve just come out of a hot house that only had yellow lights and everything looks blue (try it sometime, it’s really unsettling) speaking of which, the neon color palette didn’t help things much either. However, once you find your entry into the brisk river of weirdness things start to mellow out and make sense. With frustratingly little backstory early on, it’s unclear why Billy needs five thousands dollars, but you root for him all the same. He’s a high school dropout and mathematical genius who found a glitch in payroll that exponentially upgraded his wages, if only all of us were so lucky. Meeting Rozebud shifted his focus from the financial to the romantic, which just emphasizes how flighty, immature and uncertain he really is. In the meantime, out of nowhere, Donut appears and takes all Billy’s attention. The director threw a lot at us and if you mash it all together it becomes a story… but in the end a lot of it felt like filler.
Speaking of filler, the friend characters are almost inconsequential and only around as fodder for metaphor like children on the cusp of adulthood versus Billy’s adult-like attitude that’s simply overlaying a childish nature or something like that. So, they have a part to play, but nothing to get attached to. With all of this extraneous stuff floating around, adding character backstories, wackiness or any other info would have made it hard to hang in there. I will say that most, if not all, things we were so perplexed by throughout the film magically reveal themselves in the last 15-ish minutes, so if you can manage to hold on you’ll end up having a good time. The complete right turn they take in the final moments of the story is confusing and unexpected, but I’ll let you decide on your own if that’s a good or bad thing. I know it sounds like I’m bagging the movie pretty hard, but after all is said and done, Billy and the gang left me with a warming glow of joy so I consider that a win, personally.
Boys Go To Jupiter arrives at SIFF Film Center on 8/15, get tickets