The particular desperation of the American teenager has found its new ground zero: a sun-bleached Florida suburb during the existential void between Christmas and New Year’s. In Boys Go to Jupiter, we meet Billy 5000, a high school dropout whose life has contracted to a single, quantifiable goal: earn $5,000. Why? To escape his sister’s garage.
This is the new American dream, apparently. Director Julian Glander captures an atmosphere of profound adolescent listlessness, where the air is thick with humidity and ennui. Billy’s friends mill about on the beach, engaging in half-hearted acts of rebellion and composing truly terrible rap songs. Into this deadpan reality, strange objects appear.
Peculiar delivery customers issue odder demands. Alien creatures, worm-like and silent, squirm in the sand, greeted not with wonder but with the same flat affect as everything else. It’s just another Tuesday.
Have a Grubby Day
Billy’s chosen path to salvation is through the gig economy, a territory the film maps with surgical precision and dry wit. His work for the cheerfully named app “Grubster” is a masterclass in modern, algorithmic serfdom, where indignities are atomized into individual five-star transactions. The system’s genius is in its gamification of debasement.
One customer demands Billy feed spaghetti through a letterbox; another asks him to pre-chew their meal for a few extra bucks. He obliges, because a good rating is paramount. This is not social realism; it is a hyper-realist satire of a system that masks its exploitation with upbeat notifications.
The high priest of this new religion is Mr. Moolah, a disembodied digital guru who preaches a gospel of vapid hustle from the cloud. He is the voice of the algorithm, promising liberation through deeper enslavement.
This absurd labor exists within an equally absurd local economy, typified by the Dolphin Groves fruit science company. Here, a millionaire scientist obsesses over patenting freaky citrus hybrids, a perfect metaphor for Florida’s manufactured reality. While Billy pursues this lonely, transactional grind, his friends engage in low-stakes, communal acts of petty theft. Their aimlessness is a stark counterpoint to Billy’s isolating ambition.
A Pastel Videogame Purgatory
Glander renders his world with a kind of digital naïveté that is both unsettling and strangely beautiful. The animation, with its simple, rounded 3D models and blocky forms, rejects photorealism for something more emotionally authentic. Characters’ faces are nearly blank slates, their muted expressions amplifying the deadpan dialogue.
The entire film is soaked in a “vaporwave” color scheme of hazy pinks and teals, the aesthetic of a half-remembered dream or an early-generation videogame. This choice is not merely stylistic; it creates a palpable sense of detachment. The clean, pastel surfaces of the world stand in stark contrast to the messy, often gross, reality of Billy’s work.
This visual dissonance is amplified by camera angles that often peer down on the action, positioning the audience as distant observers of specimens in a sterile terrarium. This mirrors the detached way gig platforms view their workers: as data points to be managed.
The soundscape operates on a similar principle. This is a musical, but the songs are unpolished, lo-fi synth tunes that bubble up as repressed psychic states. Freckles’ boasts become awkward folk ballads; Billy’s quiet sadness manifests as dreamy synth-pop. They are a defense mechanism, allowing for the expression of deep feeling only through an ironic filter.
The Price of a Soul
The film’s surrealism solidifies around a small, donut-shaped alien that imprints on Billy. This creature is the story’s silent, moral center. It represents a connection free from commerce, a relationship based on simple presence rather than a transaction.
It wants nothing, offers nothing, and asks only for existence. Naturally, in the economy of Boys Go to Jupiter, such a thing must eventually be assigned a value. The narrative presents Billy with a stark choice: his $5,000 goal in exchange for the creature. This is not a simple test of good versus evil. The money represents a tangible escape from a degrading life, a ticket out of the garage.
The film does not judge him for the temptation. Instead, it frames his dilemma as the central conflict of a generation inheriting a precarious world. The alien symbolizes an older form of value—kinship, wonder, an appreciation for the uselessly beautiful—that is fundamentally incompatible with the new reality of monetized existence.
It is a fable for our time, giving a cute, doughy face to the abstract concept of non-monetary worth. It leaves one to ponder the quiet, daily compromises we all make, and to ask what, if anything, remains off the table.
Boys Go to Jupiter premiered at the Tribeca Festival on June 7, 2024, and is set for a limited U.S. theatrical release on August 8, 2025, via Cartuna and Irony Point.
Full Credits
Director: Julian Glander
Writer: Julian Glander
Producers: Julian Glander, Peisin Yang Lazo
Executive Producers: Peisin Yang Lazo
Cast: Jack Corbett, Janeane Garofalo, Tavi Gevinson, Elsie Fisher, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, Julio Torres, Joe Pera, Miya Folick, Sarah Sherman, Cole Escola, Max Wittert, Chris Fleming, Eva Victor, River L. Ramirez, Demi Adejuyigbe
Composer: Julian Glander
The Review
Boys Go to Jupiter
Boys Go to Jupiter is a wonderfully strange and intelligent piece of animation. It functions as a sharp critique of algorithmic capitalism, wrapped in a pastel, dream-like aesthetic. While its deliberately slow pace and deadpan tone may deter some, its quiet examination of what it means to retain one's soul in a transactional world is both timely and profound. A bizarre and brilliant fable for the side-hustle generation.
PROS
- An intelligent and sharp satire of the gig economy and modern capitalism.
- A unique and memorable lo-fi animation style with a distinct pastel palette.
- Explores thought-provoking philosophical themes about value and integrity.
- Effective dry humor and a consistently deadpan tone.
- Original score and musical numbers that reveal character depth.
CONS
- The deliberately slow and meandering pace could feel tedious to some viewers.
- Its detached, deadpan style might be perceived as emotionally distant.
- The high degree of surrealism may feel alienating or overly strange.
- Some interesting supporting characters are not fully explored.
