Former Reviews
-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
-Paper Mario
-Magnolia
-Hero
-The Pianist
Info about the movie
Title: Up
Year: 2009
Genre: Animation
Duration: 96 minutes
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If I have to believe imdb, Up is with a distance the second best animation movie ever made (right after Wall-E). With an 8.5 score, it leaves classics such as The Lion King (8.2) and Toy Story (8.1) far behind. However after hearing several not-so-very positive stories from friends about this movie, I decided I had to give it a watch and see what it was like.
I have to say the movie starts out pretty good. You'll first get introduced to the old man (Carl) and his life story, which delivers a few funny scenes but the general overtone is pretty sad.
Without spoiling too much: The old man and his wife once had a dream to explore South-America and build their house on top of a cliff with a beautiful waterfall (paradise falls). They never got a change to chase this dream however and when the wife passes away, the old man is left alone. On one day the man is forced to move out of his old house, but by lifting his house with balloons he manages to get away and he finally gets a chance to chase his big dream. He takes an unexpected passenger with him though. An 8 year-old boyscout which the old man shooed the day before. When they (fairly quickly) get to South-America, they end up at the wrong side of the cliff and have to walk all the way to the other side. That's when the real adventure begins.
These were about the first 35 minutes of the movie and up to this point I was enjoying it. I especially thought the grumpy old man was a very charming character. The next few scenes were also slightly enjoyable, but at the half way point the movie just slowly started to die on me. At about this point the bad guys of this story were introduced for the first time and this is where the movie started to take a few turns that I didn't like much. For instance, I didn't like the bad guys at all. They kinda went from good to evil to good to evil etc. with every few scenes. Up to a point where I couldn't really care much about them anymore. I think I just prefer a more consistent bad guy. On top of that a few very distracting side plots started to occur. They mostly had to do with morality issues which apparently just needed to be forced into it (it's Disney after all). I was just thinking "FUCK THAT, GET ON WITH IT!". They weren't even worked out that well and felt a bit illogical at times. Then the big finale of the movie came, where nothing really unexpected occurred.
So all in all I was slightly disappointed with this, even though my friends warned me. The first half of the movie was fairly enjoyable, but the second half wasn't that great. Overall it's just nothing more than just the average animation movie. It's no better than The Lion King or Toy Story for example. My suggestion would be that if you're interested or just love Disney/animation movies, then go and watch it. But if it doesn't sound appealing to you, then you don't need to see it because you're not missing much.
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*SPOILER*
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Muntz must have been at least 100 years old and been living in that cave for decades. However he looks just as old and vital as Carl is. I wonder how he managed to survive that long and managed to stay in a relatively good shape =/
