After the requisite prologue explaining the premise, we meet two two attractive youngsters from the opposing planets — lower world Adam (Jim Sturgess) and upper world Eden (Kirsten Dunst) — as they spot each other from their respective mountain peaks and fall instantly in love. Alas, their idyllic zero-gravity makeout sessions are interrupted one day by guards from the upper world and while trying to get Eden back to her planet, there is an accident and it appears as though she has been killed.
Ten years pass and Adam is now working in a dingy Transworld factory while attempting to devise a revolutionary beauty cream that harvests the rejuvenating power of pollen taken from pink bees (and you thought I was just kidding about things got nuttier?) when he is stunned to see Eden on television alive, well and also in the employ of Transworld. Adam then launches an elaborate plan to reconnect with his beloved that, if I have it correctly, entails using his beauty cream formula as a way of getting a job in Transworld headquarters and making requests for samples of the anti-gravity mineral that he will surreptitiously hide on his person in order to sneak up to the upper world and sweep Eden off her feet.
It seems impossible that a scheme as well-planned as this could possibly fail but it turns out that there are a couple of minor hiccups. For one thing, it seems that Eden's accident has left her with amnesia, so when Adam finally does get to see her, she has absolutely no recollection of who he is. For another, the anti-gravity mineral has a disconcerting tendency to burst into flame after about an hour of usage. Nevertheless, Adam continues to visit Eden in hopes of jogging her memory. But he finds himself in increasing danger once the Transworld executives finally realize what he is doing.
By all rational standards, "Upside Down" is one of the dumbest movies that you will see in your entire life. Right from the start, it takes its first giant misstep with a prologue that is meant to simultaneously set up the story and explain the physics of the twin world gimmick in ways that will more or less satisfy the average moviegoer or at the very least keep them from asking pesky questions about the apparent lack of orbits or how the twinned worlds can have sunrises, sunsets and the like.
Unfortunately, writer-director Juan Diego Solanas has made the bizarre decision to explain these details entirely through Adam's voiceover rather than, you know, showing us how it works. This is a bad enough idea on the surface but it sinks (rises?) even further through the dreadful line readings of Jim Sturgess, who is such a wispy twerp her that his character in "One Day" seems to display a Lee Marvin-like sense of gravitas by comparison.
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