Upside Down is a creatively beautiful but dramatically frustrating movie. Writer/director Juan Solanas explores all the creative possibilities of the science fiction world he’s created, but strips the drama of any momentum or impact.
Adam (Jim Sturgess) and Eden (Kirsten Dunst) live in two different worlds, literally. One world is rightside up, the other is upside down literally on top of the bottom world, but the upper world and the lower world are forbidden from interacting. Now you know that’s just going to create some Romeo and Juliet action right there, and indeed Adam and Eden already have an established relationship when the film starts. Then she gets amnesia and doesn’t see Adam for 10 years.
Giving Eden amnesia completely strips her character of any agency. She is not actively trying to reunite, and even when Adam finds a way back to upper world, he has to convince her to remember him. A Romeo and Juliet story would give both characters an incentive to defy their society’s laws. An amnesia story is completely different. All Eden needs is a metaphorical bump on the head to remember her long lost love. Instead of star-crossed interplanetary lovers, we’ve got The Vow in space. Now Adam is just lying to spend time with someone who thinks he’s a stranger, hiding that he’s from the lower world, let alone hiding their pre-amnesia past.
The world itself is beautiful and leads to some striking uses of gravity. Offices, dance floors and even basketball courts exist on top of each other, a mirror image with the upside down side having a gravity separate from the lower side. Basically, the whole movie looks like that one scene in Inception where she folds the city on top of itself.
Adam already figured out how to lower Eden into his atmosphere when they were kids. When Adam figures out how to temporarily break into upper world, they have some fun with his gravity. He uses inverse matter counterweights to hold himself down, because he comes from lower gravity. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the bathroom scene made me giggle.
The elaborate creativity of traversing upper and lower worlds only reinforces the wasted story in the amnesia subplot. Why not have two long lost loves stealing time against the law that would keep each of them in their place? It would give Eden something to do, and they could use their inverse matter to evade cops bound by one gravity. There’s no drive to their relationship when one of them doesn’t even know they have a relationship. Adam’s adventures in upper world would be exciting if he had something that warranted taking the risk, but he’s kind of just a stalker.
Any premise this metaphysical is going to have some loose rules. In Upside Down, the physics of opposite gravity kind of makes sense. Inverse matter trapped below can float to the top. Sure, that would probably happen in such a world. But if it’s forbidden for lower and upper people to interact, WHY HAVE OFFICES ON TOP OF EACH OTHER AT ALL??? The first thing Adam does when he gets a new job is talk with a coworker above him (Timothy Spall). Let alone all the dancers in those parallel dance halls or pickup games in those basketball courts.
Now, I do have a catch-all explanation for oversights like this in movies. They have offices on top of each other because it’s awesome. Being awesome makes it okay that it doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t make it okay that it violates the film’s own rules. All they had to say was, “It’s forbidden to civilians to interact. If you work for the same company, we interact up and down.” Or, add to the caste system and say, “Your superiors above can call on you, but you may only respond when spoken to and when you’re providing them with something they need above.” Wouldn’t that be a powerful way to illustrate upper vs. lower society?
The behind the scenes features will show you how they did the film’s gravity effects with wirework and green screen. Skip ahead about 10 minutes into the making of to bypass all the standard plot synopsis and talking heads saying how great it was to work with Solanas. Two deleted scenes are inconsequential but a deleted opening storyboard is perhaps the most fascinating idea in the film. Lots of other pre-vis and commentary reveal the evolution of certain scenes. There are some humorous grammatical or syntax errors on the title cards too, as if someone who spoke English as a second language produced the DVD/Blu-ray. I mean, I know Solanas is Argentinian but the DVD goes through quality control checks, right?
Upside Down reminds me of In Time, a science fiction movie I loved despite its loose narrative and inconsistent rules. I felt In Time was more of an abstract series of ideas about this concept of time as currency, so it worked. Upside Down is very much about a story motivated by this world, a quite successful archetypical story at that, and it blows it. And if you hated In Time, then you probably won’t even be as forgiving as I am.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
