I'm a 40 year old father of two (7 and 3 y.o.) and took them to see this last Saturday. In my life, I've never cried in the first 10 minutes of a movie (at least not because of the movie). I have teared up before (certain scenes in Saving Private Ryan do it every time) but I'm not a weepy guy overall. I cried during that scene in UP. Couldn't help myself. My kids knew that it was sad, but they weren't crying and had no real clue why Daddy was. In the grand tradition of subtexts in cartoons that only adults can appreciate, UP nailed the ups (and downs) of adult married life in 4 minutes. An amazing piece of filmmaking, regardless of the fact that it's a cartoon.
I'm not yet married, BK, but maybe it's just being older that makes you appreciate, even anticipatorily, the joys of life-long partnership, and the sadness of having your childhood dreams unfulfilled and the tragedy of being incapable of achieving your adult desires, too. That scene of Ellie sitting catatonically on the front lawn was very affecting. It was so very moving, despite whether you lived those experiences or not, which is why it was such amazing film making.
After the last bit of that montage, when Ellie has died and the screen is black for a moment, a little kid in the theater piped up, "What happened?"
Everyone laughed and it relieved some of the sadness.
So I saw it yesterday afternoon and enjoyed it for the most part. The 3-D has gotten quite good and is now pretty much not a gimmick but a tool. It was pretty sad but still had an awfully holly-wood ending. (So, it's a lot less sad than the average John Steinbeck book, say, and still more saccharin in parts, especially the end, than was, say, Bambi.) But over all it was pretty enjoyable and less manipulative and maudlin than I expected.
I'm with you, Belle. And when I was watching the movie a kid in the audience asked aloud, "What happened?" when he saw Ellie and Carl getting the bad news from a doctor about their hopes of having a child.
There seems to be some different interpretations of that doctor's scene -- I also had assumed that Ellie was finding out that she was infertile, but I've seen other people saying that she'd miscarried.
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