UPSIDE DOWN (2013)

Frankly, as a strict fantasy, it would have had the logic of a fairy tale and been easier to swallow; the science fiction trappings render it immediately questionable.

For instance, even if you buy the made-up physics that allows two spherical planets to exist in stable positions only a few thousand feet removed from one another, with passage between the two possible via an office building anchored at both sides and by mountaintops that almost touch one another, you then have to wonder how the inhabitants of both worlds can both travel miles on the surfaces of their respective globes and never have their relative distance increased by curvature.

Also, since the matter of each world is gradually explosive on the other, and this is actually used for fuel on both, it’s kind of disconcerting that they also swap booze and food. (Let alone bodily fluids, but that comes later.)

Finally, the movie seems to believe that a hero wearing what after a lot of hand-waving amounts to magnetic boots so he can visit the world of his beloved and pass for just another citizen there, will not only suffer no physiological ill effects from the blood rushing to his head for all that time, but will also be able to demonstrate perfect coordination on the other world’s terms, that includes running and jumping and dining and being perfectly charming across a dinner table.

Throughout the romantic scenes the guy’s actually hanging upside down a mile above his “ground,” not pissing his pants in terror, and he outruns cops who have the extreme benefit of being right-side-up in their own perspective.

Muscle memory doesn’t work that way.

The human circulatory system doesn’t work that way either. Why doesn’t the girl ever say to her guy — who is, I remind you, to his perspective upside down for extended periods — “Are you having a stroke? If not, why is your face beet-red?”

All in all, you might actually spend the entire first half hour of this thing glumly counting all the ways in which the movie immediately and spectacularly violates its own premise.

A fairy tale, where this premise supported two flat worlds that paralleled each other and where travel between the two was supported by magic, would have worked a lot better than this pseudo-science fiction, where the attempt to explain just makes matters unacceptably worse.

A pretty dumb story partially redeemed by some downright amazing visuals, it’s actually the second best movie where Kirsten Dunst kisses a guy upside down…