Prolabas
Deeper than the descriptions
Gurlyndrobb
While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.
Lollivan
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
Rio Hayward
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
wolfen244
First I gotta say that the credits took an incredible 9 minutes and 10 seconds. No joke. In the olden days it used to be either a 10 second See Ya, a God Love Ya and a pat on the kazoo and you can turn the lights back on or a short list of credits. Then in the late 70's the Actors Guild made it a mandatory 5 minutes - which I understand - the same as the length of time for the time it takes to run all of the commercials now that used to take only one minute on t.v. But 9 minutes? Oh well.Next I have never seen so much kissing in a movie from 2 people in any movie ever. It was a pleasure to see Kirsten Dunst do a lot of smiling.And talk about boy meets girl, boy loses girl and then boy meets girl again. This movie is the one. Have fun with this little gem. Oh and speaking of gravity and polar opposites, ever heard of dark energy? Think about it. Edgar Cayce called it Night Side Forces. He said that the Altanteans used night side forces as a partial explanation for how they built the great pyramids 12,400 years ago after emigrating to Egypt, the Pyrenees and to the Amazon. How else do you move limestone blocks the size of a house because it wasn't done manually as Egyptologists would have you believe.I have to have 2 more lines. Okay. This movie was quite original except for the few obvious takes from Spider Man. The part that bothered me the most was the falling and no one getting hurt nonsense. Oh well. It was a fantasy so sue me.
NateWatchesCoolMovies
Upside Down is as pleasing, uplifting and visually striking as low key romantic fantasy gets. It's got a vibe that's never over the top or showboating, yet never dull or plodding. I must emphasize the visual aspect before I go further because it's spectacular, and with a movie concerning the concept it attempts, visuality is the number one quality it should strive for in transporting you to it's world. And strive it does, whisking us away to not one world, but two! Adjacent twin planets who converge upon each other's orbit by a margin of a mere few hundred meters. On one orb live the rich, privileged folk, and on the other, lower class people, divided by the two realms, and the filmmaker's sometimes obvious metaphor of class division, regardless of how many planets the respective race inhabits. In any good romance involving these undertones (*cough*Titanic) there has to be a touching relationship, in this case between an urchin from the wrong side of the tracks named Adam (reliably sweet Jim Sturgess, in this case from the wrong side of many hemispheres) and a young lady from the upper crust world called Eden (Kirsten Dunst). They meet at a point where two mountain ranges from their respective worlds line up, and they are able to get close enough to interact, and fall in love. Ten years after their initial encounter, Adam sets off on a quest to the other planet to find Eden, pursued by authorities who don't like to see lesser class citizens in their neck of the woods. The planets have different gravitational pulls which makes for some excellent visual effects a la Inception as well. Peter Pettigrew- I mean Timothy Spall steals all his scenes as a chatty, sympathetic office drone who feels for Adam and aids him in his attempts to reconnect with his lost love. Like I said before this is low key, so don't expect any lofty explanations or sci fi stuff as to why these two worlds align or what's going on in the grand scheme. The film simply takes place in these worlds, expects you to except that without qualms, and live in its mindset for a couple hours. Sturgess and Dunst are believable and never slip into melodrama as the pair. But it's the visual effects and cinematography that are the star here. It kills me I never got to see this one in theatres, it's just breathtaking. It calls to mind stuff like The Lovely Bones and What Dreams May Come, while adding its own almost fairy tale mythology of worlds separated, love lost, and hope remaining.
jinsilver
Almost a mundane 5-star movie... but the exposition of the first ten minutes was so bad and so unnecessary. Not one word of it was needed, and the movie would have succeeded by showing instead. The introduction left a bad taste that lingered the whole way.But damn, some of the CG and was just so striking. The dual office, the plunge from one world to the other, and most of all, the celestial cloud scene. Even when they didn't make sense, they were amazing visually, and I'd happily put some on my wall. It's better visual art than a movie.Aside from that, the plot fell down the cliché tree and hit every branch on the way down. It constantly struggled to figure out if it wanted to be a star-crossed romance or a sci-fi thriller in the vein of Dark City, leading to whiplash from the mood shifts, and neither the writers nor the acting could carry either. Even the leads have the depth (and chemistry) of a kiddie pool, let alone the rest of the cast. Practically everything interesting is just handwaved away to move the plot, even the sappy ending. You constantly drift away and asking yourself why you're still watching.It's too bad, because so much more could be done with the premise, even with some romance, as shown by the much better Patema Inverted. I think there's still plenty of room for a real thriller here too, it's just not this movie. At all.
Johan Dondokambey
The movie's basic premise is indeed a very nice new take on the sci-fi genre, although the movie itself is more heavy on the romantic side, and the science-fiction can be deemed too far to be scientific as it may be even called as pseudo-science. Yet it's good that the movie stated it's focus on the starting narration so that the audience don't feel cheated on. Also the movie nicely keeps it's focus on the more romantic side. Then again I feel that the movie wasted too much time in building up the story after Adam sees Eden on TV until the next time they meet. Also the story kind of skipped itself when out of a sudden Eden regains her memory. The acting overall is a little bit above the standard by both Jim Sturgess and Kirsten DUnst. I just wished that the movie used younger and fresher talents instead.