Boys Go to Jupiter (2025) Movie Review: A Weird Little Charmer that Encapsulates Present-Day Anxieties about Capitalism

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Julian Glander’s “Boys Go to Jupiter” (2025) is a coming-of-age film about an ambitious teenager trying to find his place in the world, but it is just as much a critique of late-stage capitalism. So, it becomes another project to take a gander at this topic through characters whose lives are either affected or governed by capitalistic laws. It paints this picture through the eyes of a young man working as a rider for an online food delivery service. It naturally becomes a relevant portrait of modern-day gig workers, whose lives are at the mercy of their unruly employers and customers’ whims.

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Last year, Boris Lojkine’s “Souleymane’s Story” analyzed this exploitative practice through the life of a Guinean immigrant working as a cyclist for a similar app. Through his story, Lojkine also examined the grueling asylum-seeking process in France. More recently, Aziz Ansari’s “Good Fortune” captured the dehumanizing nature of gig workers with a soft satirical spin on the classic role-reversal narrative. Speaking about the approach, Lojkine relied on naturalism, while Ansari focused on a mix of humor and humanism. Unlike them, Glander’s film takes a surrealistic route to follow his gig-working protagonist in a world filled with whimsical characters.

Glander uses his adorable 3D animated style, previously featured in everything from Adult Swim to The New York Times. He renders characters and their surroundings with soft, rounded edges and shows them mainly in wide shots. So, in his style, the world feels like a cross between the aughts’ video games and LEGO models. The clouds look like weirdly shaped cotton candies, while some trees look like molten and fused M&M’s. As if that’s not strange enough, the film features jelly-like creatures that belong to no specific species, and a hybrid animal that runs a highly profitable conglomerate.

Glander fits all his peculiar world-building acumen into a coming-of-age archetype to follow a teen desperate to leave his present-day life. He trades in the known genre beats, showing his protagonist on a journey toward a defining moment of culmination. However, his film isn’t about a character overcoming grave internal conflicts and learning self-acceptance despite his flaws or insecurities. Instead, it’s about someone overcoming his societal status and seeking financial independence.

The protagonist, Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett), doesn’t suffer from any mental health concerns, nor is he consumed with teenage angst. Instead, he is constantly trying to earn enough so he can pay Gail 5000 (Eva Victor) back for her financial support. Despite his young age, he is mature enough to understand the ways of his world. To be self-sufficient, he enters the drudgery of hustle culture and starts delivering anything his customers want, even at odd hours. Yet, he isn’t an insufferable incel, priding himself on being a part of capitalistic drivel. He understands the mechanics of this system but is clever enough to fight against it in his own way.

Boys Go to Jupiter (2025) — A still from “Boys Go to Jupiter” (2025)

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The film presents Billy as a confident, self-aware man who understands his strengths and weaknesses surprisingly well for someone his age. He spends his free time with his slacker friends, who pass their days rapping, beatboxing, or playing around with little to no concern about their futures. Unlike them, Billy stays away from reckless abandon with an eagle-eyed focus on his goals. In between, he crosses paths with Rozebud (Miya Folick), the sole heir to a lucrative enterprise, who shares his contempt for capitalism but remains in the comfort of her familial privilege.

Besides them, Glander introduces a few more characters that reflect the modern struggles with fundamentalism and capitalism. There are customers with their absurdly unreasonable demands and strangers devoted to the slippery slope of the American Dream. Through them, Glander finds ways to talk about the roots of the gig economy and its effects on customers, restaurant owners, and delivery personnel.

Then there are parallel narrative threads about alien creatures and scientific experiments that Glander somehow manages to tie back to his acute observations on the messy structures humans have built for themselves over time. Glander also introduces a mythology of strange creatures that Billy stumbles upon, but doesn’t expand on those details, keeping it sufficiently vague. That ambiguity makes Billy’s eventual decision about these creatures seem poetically personal.

On paper, the film is a massive creative gamble that tries to marry its absurdity through a string of zany episodes. At times, it abruptly breaks into elaborate gags or songs that break the flow of its central narrative. Still, those quirky episodes win you over through their charming, childlike enthusiasm. That quirkiness remains the film’s key highlight, also letting its characters become memorable even when they are limited to their surface-level attributes.

While not a scathing critique of labor exploitation, “Boys Go to Jupiter” tenderly captures our anxieties about coping with the seemingly inescapable rat race. Overall, it stands out from the recent animated projects, thanks to its unapologetically absurdist style, to follow a story that adults can resonate with, while not losing touch with the child at its heart.