Let’s get this out of the way at the start. Jupiter Ascending isn’t a great movie, nor is it for everyone. It’s a big, splashy space opera, full of elaborate technologies and long and complex action scenes, unfolding behind a pretty stuffy romance. But it’s just weird enough, and ambitious enough, and exciting enough to make it worth two hours. And, coming from the makers of The Matrix, you can rest assured that it looks incredible and contains layers and distractions aplenty. Plus, it’s full of that old fashion Wachowski cannibalism.

Andy and Lana Wachowski are obsessed with the literal consumption of human bodies. We humans are, according to the Wachowski Siblings, little more than cattle, batteries, blood. In their latest film, Jupiter Ascending, literally billions of human bodies are destroyed and cannibalized by the rich (off-screen, thank goodness). The people in Soylent Green never had it so good.

It’s People.

In the first installment of The Matrix, before he learns the truth about human beings, Neo is confronted and derided as a “coppertop.” It’s a great joke, referring to the colors of a popular brand of battery. And it encapsulates what the Wachowskis seem to think about the physical human body: its chief value is as a resource for literal consumption.

In The Matrix Series, written and directed by the Wachowskis between 1999 and 2003, there are two worlds of human existence. One is the Matrix, the world we know and live in but is actually a digital replica of the world we think we know. Then there’s the ‘real world,’ where human beings are grown in fields and contained forever in pods full of pink goo. Humans are crops, harvested for energy to power the machines that now run the world. Yah humanity!

In Cloud Atlas, adapted from the novel by David Mitchell (and co-directed with Tom Tykwer, who did not direct the segment in question), there is an entire class of human beings called Fabricants. Fabricants are human clones who operate as slaves. They labor under a contract with a specified end date, and when that date arrives, the Fabricants are free to live as any other in society.

But as a Wachowski film, such freedom will not, of course, arrive. Instead, upon the end of a fabricant’s contract, they are sent to a slaughterhouse and processed in to, you guessed it, food. Which is then used to feed the Fabricants still toiling as slaves.

Which brings us to Jupiter Ascending. There’s so much going on in this film—a love story (not a good one, between Mila Kunis’ Jupiter Jones and Channing Tatum’s Caine Wise), a parable of immigration (this story’s pretty good: Technically she’s an alien, get it? But we all are!), genetic engineering (Caine is half human, half wolf!), poor military conduct (Sean Bean reprising the role played by Sean Bean in every movie), even an entire scene of bureaucratic nonsense inspired by (and guest featuring) Terry Gilliam—that a plot summary would take two-hours to recount. Since the movies only two-hours itself, we’ll just move to the humans consuming humans part.

On that front, here’s what’s going on in Jupiter Ascending: The human race is billions of years old. Some humans, wealthy elites called “entitleds,” live for tens of thousands of years because these rich folks have access to a fountain of youth: a youth-serum called Regenerex (or something).

Regenerex, it so happens, is made from human beings. Growing enough people to keep up supplies is a lot of work. That work is managed by the Abrasax Family, three industrialist siblings who grow, harvest, and process their powerful cash crop on planets all across the galaxy. They seed human life on a planet, wait for evolution to achieve a ‘state of Darwinian perfection’, then harvest all the people on those planets to manufacture Regenerex.

And so it is on Earth, where Jupiter Jones toils cleaning toilets, unaware that her presence is a risk to the harvesting of earth. In Jupiter Ascending, the question at hand is never one of ending the industrial farming of human beings. As a practice, that’s not in jeopardy.

Perhaps this scope of action is better? More realistic even, if such a word belongs within a mile of Jupiter Asscending. All these millions of years of agricultural practices are not likely to end because one person is disgusted by it all. Hey, the world doesn’t change just because you want it to, right? Jupiter won’t be saving billions of humans from slaughter (she’s not Neo, after all). The question is one only of what will happen to the humans of earth, and Jupiter’s mom.

The advanced culture on display in Jupiter Ascending, the culture of the Abrasax and the entitleds, is not that far from the battery-people of The Matrix, or the clones-feeding-clones future of Cloud Atlas. The Wachowskis have updated cannibalism for our modern consuming culture, and asked gruesome questions about what lengths we’ll reach for comfort and wealth. All in shiny, high production value cinema.

In all that glorious 3-D beauty, the unwitting humans of thousands of planets are literally turned into blue muck for the rich to bathe in. It is the kind of system where it’s perfectly appropriate for Balem Abrasax (played with a maniacal glee by the subdued Eddie Redmayne in a performance that you really have to see to believe) to tell Jupiter Jones that ‘Human society is a pyramid. Some people are more important than others.”

Not that such a system of power is difficult comprehend. Right now, in the United States, the wealthiest 0.1% of the population holds as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined. Around the world, up to 36 million people live in slavery. The rich aren’t bathing in the remains of the poor, but that they might is not quite impossible to believe.

All this sci-fi cannibalism is dark stuff, of course, and it makes a ripe backdrop for all that other nonsense that’s zipping around Jupiter Ascending. Because this is still a wacky sci-fi space opera, filled with spaceships and blaster fights and dinosaur henchmen. Are billions of humans cannibalized? Yes. And it’s terrible. But it’s also the Wachowskis. Cannibalism never looked better.

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