My first selection for July was a complete shot in the dark at a movie I had never heard of, Upside Down (2012). A grandiose love story about a universe with twin planets. This movie starts off in an entirely aggravating way, the opening monologue is only four and a half minutes in length, but it felt twice as long while I watched it. A grating, fantasy-esque voice (Jim Sturgess) narrates over “hand drawn” animations, and spends the entire four and a half minutes telling, not showing the world of the movie. This is obviously a major faux pas in the world of cinema. The way it was animated and narrated set the tone for this to not be a very good movie, and, sorry for the spoiler, but it set the correct tone. 

Adam (Jim Sturgess) as a young kid goes out to harvest this magical purple bee pollen that causes food to float. Already, the setting of this movie is starting to feel stapled together and half-assed. While harvesting this pollen, he climbs a big mountain that mirrors a mountain in the other world. And of course, he meets a young girl there, Eden (Kirsten Dunst)  around his age and falls in love. This is their secret magical meeting place, and they pull each other into the other’s world with a big rope and hang out and chat and eat pomegranates together. How cute and lovely.

Eventually, they get caught by the authorities and she has to go back to her planet, and he of course gets his aunt arrested. Then we get a time skip to 20 or so years later, and Adam is now working in an underground facility using the same purple bee pollen to try to make an anti-aging cream. This movie is all over the place in terms of the ‘plot’. 

Adam then decides he’s going to get a job at Transworld Corporation, because he sees that Eden works there on a TV show… The company that killed his parents when he was a kid and orphaned him. Also, it’s been like 20 years since he last saw her. This whole premise is just bad from every angle. 

Somehow he gets hired, and there’s a scene where he’s interacting with one of the “higher ups” and the guy says to Adam “You won’t steal from us, I can tell.” Which is just a weird line of dialogue in the first place, and also like??? Adam was arrested by the authorities that the corporation controls for literally breaching between the two planets. Do they not have this on record? This movie is so inconsistent. 

Eventually he finds Eden, and asks her to lunch and LIES to her about who he is. Like what??? Just more bad characterization and story happening. Almost everything this movie did rubbed me the wrong way in terms of world building, story telling, characterization, plot etc etc etc.

I’m gonna take a minute here to talk about the way this movie looks also. Talk about boring and drab, in every scene. The opening scenes with Adam and Eden atop the mountain are so grey scale even the pomegranates they’re eating look unappetizing. Adam’s house he lived in with his aunt as a kid is just brown on brown on brown, from the exterior to the interior. The only thing of color in this entire sequence is the purple bee pollen pancakes. The animation of them flying across the kitchen was very cheesy.

The office of Transworld Corporation where Adam works has bright stark white lights everywhere, with black walls. Just another variation of the drab that this movie is full of. I think in each scene in this movie, there are maybe a maximum of three colors on screen, if that. 

The plot of this movie makes just about as much sense as the physics of the universe in which it takes place. When Adam is infiltrating the other planet, he has weights in his jacket from his world, so that they’re attracted to the gravity of his planet. Then he can walk normally without floating up/back to his planet. They set up the rule in the opening monologue of the movie that matter from one planet can only exist so long on the other planet or else it burns up trying to get back to its own planet. This actually isn’t a rule, but just something they say. The amount of time that Adam exists in Eden’s world and vice versa is completely random and the limitations are only utilized when the ‘plot’ needs it to be driven. 

The world building, if you can call it that, of this movie is entirely nonsensical. Transworld Corporation is this evil corporation that exists between both planets (also how does a day night cycle work when there’s literally a building connecting the two planets?) Transworld has an economic hold on both planets, turning Adam’s planet into an impoverished one, while the other one is supposedly thriving. This is all set up in the very boring and agitating opening of Upside Down. It feels like it’s set up to be a major plot point in the story, but much like everything else in this movie, it falls flat on its face and is completely forgotten, and therefore of no importance. Somehow, it is believed that Adam’s anti-aging cream invention will save all of both planets, unite them, and everything will magically become a utopia. This again is all nonsensical and makes absolutely no sense, primarily because it’s so far fetched, and because this piece of the plot has zero legs to stand on due to the execution of it. 

Eden is one of the most blank slate characters I’ve ever seen in a movie, outside of Bell in Twilight. She exists solely to be the love lost by Adam. She has no characterization of her own outside of this, no development, nothing of interest to anyone but Adam. This ruins the romantic plot of this movie.

There’s also a scene at the end where the two of them are again running from the authorities, and they end up inside the wire frame of a giant blimp, jumping from floating crate to floating crate. This scene not only looked really bad, but it just came out of left field. Nowhere in the movie had looked anything like this prior to this scene, nor after this scene. This part of the movie upset me so much, it just perfectly summed up everything wrong with the half-assed ideas that this movie is full of.

I’m not sure if you can tell based on the tone of my review, but I found there to be zero redeeming qualities about this movie. And I didn’t even bother to take the time to talk about how on the nose and moronic it is that the main characters are named ADAM AND EDEN. Jim Sturgess’s voice from the second this movie started pissed me off. The utter bullshit that is Upside Down’s so-called ‘plot’. The lack of characterization. The lack of sense of the physics and world that this movie takes place in, when they spend FOUR AND A HALF MINUTES telling you about it, only to throw all of it out of the window willy-nilly, just everything about this movie is so unbelievably unenjoyable. I would not recommend this movie to anyone, ever, for any reason. 

-0 mallards /5

-Seann

Somehow I’ve managed to do it again…AGAIN! This is another movie based off of a book which is a memoir, so it’s supposedly based on events that really happened. This is a very similar movie to Unbroken (2014), which I reviewed last month. This is a slightly better movie, or reasons that I’ll get into, but it’s remarkable how similar they are. In the mid-2010s there really was a formula I guess. When I say similar I mean there are moments where these are almost scene-for-scene, like the parts where they’re on a boat stranded at sea…or the parts where they get beaten up by prison wardens…or the end where they show pictures of the real guys.

The first reason this one is better is because of the start. We are just dropped into the movie at the beginning, where things should usually start. We get a little bit of backstory about his life, but not any cheesy flashbacks to his childhood or his moments in Church or anything. We just get a snapshot of his life before he’s sent to prison. This is good because we don’t particularly care about the main guy’s childhood – I think the much longer backstory given in Unbroken (2014) was a mistake. It made everything feel very melodramatic and therefore I cared less about it. The main character in Papillon (2017), Papillon, is much more interesting to me because we don’t know that much about him. To be honest, he’s portrayed as a bit of a jerk so when he gets sent to prison it’s not that much of an issue for the viewer. I found this much more believable than the “he was the perfect kid” of Unbroken (2014).

Another shocking similarity between the movies is the runtime. Unbroken (2014) has a runtime of 2 hours and 17 minutes, while Papillon (2017) has a runtime of 2 hours and 13 minutes. I think this movie made better use of its time than the other, and a far greater number of things actually occurred in the movie. Somehow it was also more psychological. Papillon gets put into solitary confinement (twice!) and there are some real moments of expressionism present. Pretty artsy! That’s what happens when you get a real director to direct your movie. 

In addition to the above jab, the cinematography was just overall more impressive in this movie as well. There was deliberate use of angled shots, varied distances, and a more robust color palette. The location in which it was shot, I will admit, made it rather easier to have some interesting scenes. This film largely takes place in French Guiana, which is mostly a tropical rainforest, while the other movie took place largely in a prison in Japan. Still, the environment plays a much larger role in this movie and Papillon gets moved around a couple times, and each time he arrives somewhere new we get to experience a cool new climate. 

The acting was also superb. I found the Rami Malek character, Dega, to be totally believable and consistent all the way through. I like his acting in general, and he played this role expertly, especially at the end when we see him in his most disheveled state. Charlie Hunnam was also good as the eponymous Papillon, though I was less familiar with his work before going into this movie. I think one pitfall of this movie is that basically the two guys I mentioned just now are good and everyone else is bad. Even the people who we think are going to be their friends end up being bad (maybe that’s a spoiler, but it’s easily predictable). 

The biggest downside of a movie like this is that, to me, it’s just really not that interesting. I mean it was a movie that got me invested, definitely, and I wanted Papillon to fulfill his desires, and he did have an absolutely wild ride…but there’s not much to it behind that. In some ways this movie got at a deeper thought regarding the human condition (something that Unbroken (2014) tried to shove down the viewer’s throat) but did it in such a subtle way that it was kind of ineffective. I hate to sound callous but what happened to this guy was really bad and his life was ruined because he was framed and the prison system in turn-of-the-century France was really bad, but…is that particularly inspiring? To me, no. I did like, however, that when he thinks he’s saved by Nuns they actually turn him over to the police (as he predicts). That was a great detail.

I hesitate to give this movie a really high score because of the above reason – I don’t think it’s possible for a film of this type, a “based on a true story” memoir-esque movie, because while those movies do give us something human at which to awe, they do not transcend humanity in a way that the great films of all time do. They may be inspiring in many ways, but they don’t exactly make me think or alter my worldview through the power of fiction (because they’re not really fiction). That being said this movie is very very well made, and there are few knocks I have against it. I’d encourage most readers to watch it.

Papillon (2017) has an IMDB rating of 7.2 out of 10, a shocking low Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer score of 52%, and a Letterboxd score of 3.6 out of 5. While looking up this information I was curious to compare it to Unbroken (2014) and I noticed something strange. They have the EXACT SAME ratings on these sites. 

YOU CAN’T EXPLAIN THAT

-4.0 mallards /5

-Maxwell