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Argentine writer-director Juan Solanas’ fantasy romance “Upside Down” is such a gorgeous wreck that I could almost sense Terry Gilliam somewhere muttering, “Wait a minute, I should have been the one to screw up this idea.”
Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst play lovers from different worlds, and rarely has the concept been applied so literally. His slum planet is directly opposite her glittering one, which hangs upside down in the sky overhead. When each of them climbs to the highest peak on his or her homeland, they can just about touch each other in the sky.
But they can never be together because objects from one world retain the gravitational pull of where they came from — so if he visited her world, he’d be stuck to the ceiling.
Solanas misses no opportunity for spectacle, conjuring, for instance, a skyscraper linking the two worlds where, at the exact middle, some office workers are upside down at their desks on the ceiling while directly opposite is a warren of desks on the floor. It’s like “Brazil” meets “The Poseidon Adventure.”
Sturgess’ Adam, the poor boy (Dunst’s character, groan, is Eden), contrives a way to visit her world by stealing “inverse matter” ingots he sews in his suit so he can walk on what for him is the ceiling, her floor. (Wouldn’t all the blood rush to his head? After all, his pee goes up.)
The setup is a lot of fun, as is the fairy-tale look, but the leads are so insipid, and Sturgess’ trademark wounded-puppy act is so excruciating, that the bland love story never keeps up with the effects. The movie is like an exquisitely made china cabinet built to house paper plates and a spork.