Upside Down Leaves You Hanging

Written & Directed by Juan Diego Solanas

Starring Jim Sturgess, Kirsten Dunst, Timothy Spall, Jayne Heitmeyer, and Blu Mankuma

PG-13, 107 minutes

Bad science fiction and fantasy has a way of sticking with you. Not bad in the sense that what’s being depicted couldn’t possibly happen, as anything can be credibly realized cinematically. Nor in the sense that the special effects are so horrendous that the movie itself couldn’t possibly be taken seriously either. No, I’m talking bad where a premise is so clumsily executed that incredible special effects are thrown at the project in the hopes that it can be labeled as “artistic” or “a visually resplendent exercise of the medium.” Upside Down is that movie. It’s so bad I can’t get it out of my head.

The movie begins with an almost sleep inducing voice over narration by our protagonist Adam (Jim Sturgess), who talks about two planets who reside in the same gravitational space and, thus, one is on top of the other. Those who dwell on top are rich and prosperous, while the bottom dwellers live in relative poverty. Adam, as a boy from the Down planet, meets a girl, named Eden (Kirsten Dunst), from the Up planet as they both happened to be at inverse mountain peaks at the same time. This chance meeting turns into a love affair for the ages (at leas the film hopes) until a chain of events leaves them separated for some time. Adam resolves to get onto Up, even though all matter from the Down planet cannot be sustained in Up’s gravity and vice-versa, to be with his love once again.

As stated before, it seems like all of the creative energy went into making the world’s gravitation seem credible. It does, I will give the movie that. The best effect coming in scenes where Adam goes to work in a building that employs people from both worlds in the same place (an aspect of the movie that doesn’t quite make sense given the fact that the powers at be would rather the two worlds remain separate) and his ceiling is the office space for the other world. If only a good story could have come along with all the inventive visual work. Instead, the movie follows a rote Romeo & Juliet style storyline with a mix of amnesia thrown in. Not only is everything explained in a rushed fashion that overemphasizes exposition, it does it in such a way that not a single thing makes sense, right down to the way the characters talk to each other.

To be an epic science-fiction romance, the two leads really have to sell the romance to anchor the movie. Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst don’t even possess marginally adequate chemistry together. Jim Sturgess plays the boyishly charming lead he always is, but his character wears very thin by the halfway point and I didn’t care if he succeeded in the end. Then there is Kirsten Dunst; poor Kirsten Dunst, she is failed in a script that doesn’t do her any favors. It feels like the entire impetus for her involvement in this film is to somehow top the kiss scene in Spider-Man by having her and Jim Sturgess canoodle in zero gravity limbo space.

Nothing in Upside Down works, and the blame rests purely on its script, which was written by the director. It leaves its leads floating aimlessly in search of purpose while presenting the cinematic equivalent of having the contents of a paint can poured on your head. It may be colorful, but I see no reason as to why you should watch it happen.

1/4

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