Upside Down (Juan Diego Solanas, 2012)

A romance positing the idea that two planets with opposing gravity exist side by side, Upside Down invests massively in its visuals and makes do with loose change for plot. The opening titles, over which Jim Sturgess has to explain the set-up's pretend physics while clearly struggling with sounding both American and an adult at the same time, do not bode well, and the later additions of a simpering Kirsten Dunst as his love interest in the topsy-turvy other world and an avuncular Timothy Spall, also occasionally essaying an accent, do not improve matters. She's an Uptown Girl, living in an Uptown World, and indeed the whole shebang has the intellectual sophistication of a Billy Joel song, with dialogue written by a child and heavy-handed symbolism. Most unforgivably, it frequently fails in its sole real selling point when the ludicrous physics become too much for the scriptwriter to deal with. It's a shame so many beautiful images are sullied by the bothersome requirement to tell a pointful story at the same time.

4/10