Upside Down

If they locate Hell in a kettle in Hull and discover two plus two makes £50 then you will get some idea of the asinine concept of the film “Upside Down.” A long time ago in the Golden Age of Cartoons they invented a rule called the plausible impossibility. This allows a cartoon character to run through wire and then fall apart like sliced bread. That’s a plausible impossibility. You can’t just do anything and get away with it, it has at the very least to make some sense.
Many decades ago I was at a film club and we were watching a Jean Luc Godard film. After a reel change everything was upside down in long traffic jam. For some fifteen minutes a character walked from car to car with no dialogue, such strange cinematic effects are perfectly possible in Godard film it was only when the subtitles came on everyone realised the film had been inserted upside down.
There is no such excuse for this film. I watched it because it said Sci Fi, romance, star crossed lovers and starred Kirsten Dunst and Timothy Spall. If you can bear the impossibility of the premise of the film which fails on every level of plausibility having no internal logic to make it believable and people walking upside down on the ceiling while others walk the right way up in the other world and gravity can be overcome with pregnancy then give it a go if you dare.
At its heart it’s love across the wrong side of the tracks a really hackneyed storyline done to death. Even so, it so bad you don’t care. It all hinges on pink bee pollen. Don’t ask!
The visual effects are ghastly and because they don’t make sense they are even worse.
It’s not science fiction, it’s not fantasy and it’s not experimental art house, it’s just bad. When I say bad I mean really really bad. It makes Christmas in the Smokies which I reviewed as awful shine by comparison. Plan 9 From Outer Space is a better film.
The opening blurb :
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 using matter from the opposite world (inverse matter).
3 After a few hours of contact, matter in contact with inverse matter burns.
The American Film Critic Frank Scheck found the film confusing, saying, "You practically need an advanced degree in physics to fully comprehend the convoluted physical machinations depicted in Upside Down.”
Well having studied Physics at University I can categorically tell you the premise is not able to be comprehended as it is impossible and as I said at the beginning as likely as finding that two plus two equal fifty pounds.
Needless to say it seriously flopped at the cinema.

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