It’s hard not to describe Upside Down in silly movie puns. The film has some ups, it has some downs, and overall it’s a twisted, mixed up bag of a film. Is it your bag…baby?
As high concept science fiction wrapped loosely around questionable concepts and some marshmallow fluff resembling a love story Upside Down is a mixed bag at best. For some viewers the fluff will be an enjoyable elevated romance, and for others the experience will prove to be a misstep in experimental film-making and a casualty of poor writing.
The opening voice-over frames the film’s forbidden romance inside a world where two planets with unique gravities circle each other forming a separation of economic class inequality and an imbalance in resources between planets. Specifics regarding how everything works are never really explained, and the viewer is left to imagine the implausibility of it all as an opening monologue unashamedly sets the tone for the movie’s more outlandish moments. It’s a big pill to swallow. Asking the audience to take so much down in one gulp up front is a gamble, and the overly enthusiastic reading Jim Sturgess gives of the Young Adult-style material is bound to make some viewers gag. That said, the story quickly progresses, and the air of a teenage-written love story evaporates into a somewhat entertaining sci-fi film.
Unfortunately, this one trick pony feels a lot like the movie Jumper when it comes to ingenuity. Things are upside down. That’s the shtick. Whereas Jumper had teleportation Upside Down has its magnetic-like pull and repel forces to play with, and once that element is played out it’s easy to see how thinly written and realized the rest of the movie really is. Scenes and moments where we see one gravity playing off of an opposite gravity (like how smoke interacts between layers, throwing objects between floors of upside down cubicles, or the accident caused when someone from “below” tries to use the restroom “up above”) are quirky and fun. There’s one walk-to-the-kitchen-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in particular where Sturgess’ character takes a plunge from one body of water to another that was pretty amazing, and the film deserves credit for little things like this that surprise throughout.
But what Upside Down really wants to be is a love story, and on that front it fails to capture and play with the viewer’s emotions. Romance and stories about love need to be witty, genuine, believable, inspiring, unexpected, and above all well-written and executed to really sweep an audience off its feet. Everyone’s got their own perfect love story film, and for some Upside Down’s surface-level emotional notes may resonate, but the power and beauty of a deeper connection never really bloomed between Sturgess and his on screen counterpart Kirsten Dunst. It felt like, once again, the fluff an innocent English major might put to paper after a week of binge reading Twilight or something similar, and the cuteness of it all made for an uneven yin to the inventive yang of the upside down environment.
In the end any weight, literally and figuratively, that the film had packed on or tried to pick up was tied neatly together and dissolved in a few minutes of happy ending improbabilities. It’s as if concepts like impossible attraction, getting fired from a job after 30 years, or escaping the law all come pre-packaged with a silver lining. Every sour note was corrected and every character of note got a nice little bow to wrap up their story, literally within the last few minutes, feeling forced and bringing the film full circle to a closing voice-over that reeked of overplayed emotional detachment. For a film that could have been a whole lot better Upside Down proves to be a mixed bag at best.