'Upside Down' --A Review

What an utterly ridiculous movie this was.  A science fiction fairy tale romance directed by Juan Diego Solanas, Upside Down is the story of Adam (Jim Sturgess) and Eden (Kirsten Dunst) as two lovers who have to overcome a big, big problem- namely gravity because their worlds are the only two in the whole universe that spin side by side and each have their own gravity.   This gravity, conveniently enough comes along with three rules:

1. All matter is pulled by the gravity of the world that it comes from, and not the other.
2. An object's weight can be offset by matter from the opposite world (inverse matter).
3. After some time in contact, matter in contact with inverse matter burns

They spell these rules out at the very beginning of the film, presumably so you take notes and don't forget later on- there might be a test, after all.   The fact that they insisted on spelling them out for us both made sense to me (it allowed the viewer to understand what world they were getting into) and annoyed me all at the same time.

I was never very good at physics and never took astronomy in college (though I now kind of wish I would have) but I know enough to realize that the notion of two planets spinning this close together is completely loopy.   And I might have been willing to go along with the notion for the sake of being a good sport but there's a catch:  the only place these two worlds are joined is in the world bridging skyscraper belonging to the evil Transworld Corporation.   Which raises a question:  if the two planets rotate- maybe in the same direction, maybe in opposite directions, I don't know- how does the tower stay in one place?

Never mind-  let's get to the meat and potatoes of this thing:  basically, Adam is from Down Below which is poor and exploited by the rich world Up Above.  He's an orphan but gets to visit his Aunt Becky on the weekends and harvest the magical pink peas which seem to be the only things immune to the trifecta of rules that governs this magical place.  Climbing a mountain one day (which has a mountain counterpart Up Above that comes nice and close to Down Below) Adam meets Eden and eventually the two fall in love until they're discovered one day-  Eden falls and Adam believes her dead but ten years later, he finds out she's alive and soon is racing to find a way to Up Above and reunite with his lost love.

Obviously, he does.  And, as a bonus, he knocks her up and they all live happily ever after.

I don't know about this movie.  I saw a preview for it and the preview made it look a lot more worthwhile than it actually turned out to be.  Don't get me wrong:  the concept is totally ridiculous but you could say that for a lot of movies- I was willing to go along with that but for some reason I could never really get invested in these characters.   They meet as kids and then BAM they're older and wiser and in love?   How does that happen?  WTF is up with this pink shit that keeps floating around?  If the folks Down Below can't get up above then how exactly can the people Up Above exploit them?  Surely there has to be a secret police force or something that oppresses them- otherwise what the hell are they waiting for?  Get going and rebuild some shit people!

Too many questions that should have been answered-  if they would have answered at least some of them then maybe the movie would have clicked with me a little more.  As it was, I could barely summon the energy to care and in the end just wanted it to be over as soon as possible.  Which is shame because Sturgess and Dunst had some good chemistry going and it could have been a really interesting story-  though the cinematography was amazing it just wasn't enough to make this movie work.

Overall:  Kind of a confusing yawn of a movie- I'd say if there's nothing good at Redbox and if you've got a free one and really don't have anything you want to watch on television that night then maybe, maaaaaaaaaybe it might be worth renting but other than that it's a good concept that went sort of awry somewhere.   ** out of ****