 |
| Poster by Martin Ansin. |
If you can imagine Mario bouncing on your head thinking he'd get a coin out of the deal, then getting rushed by the cast of Final Fantasies I-VI nipping off for some Potions at the local apothecary and running away with the Triforce from a very pissed off Link, all while downing an entire Costa's worth of caffeine and charging through the set of the 1960's Batman television series, you'd get an experience that roughly equates to seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Chances are you've never seen anything else quite like this before in a film; it's a hyper-kinetic rollercoaster through the other side of the arcade screen that proudly wears its geek colours on its sleeve.
Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), who despite what his name might suggest is not a religious traveler from Glasgow, but rather a 22-year old slacker-cum-hipster, and bassist in the garage band Sex Bob-Omb (as in Super Mario Bros. 2), is something of a heartbreaker, getting into relationships quickly which typically end not long after. He ends up meeting his match in the form of the beautiful and mysterious Amazon delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who operates on the Spice Girls Wannabe Principle: if you want to be her lover, you've got to get past her seven Evil Exes.
OK, it's not like that song at all, but shut up, I'm making a joke here.
The film's tone is set with a cute rendition of the Universal logo, rendered in NES-style graphics and given an 8-bit remix, a move that will no doubt have gamers giggling with delight like a baby gazing at a mobile of Mario mushrooms and Master Swords. Like Tron before it, Pilgrim proves that you can make a good videogame movie provided it's not actually based on a videogame. The very structure is based on an arcade side-scroller - the hero must fight through seven levels and defeat seven bosses to get the girl. Director Edgar Wright litters the screen with visual staples: VS. icons, health bars, combo counters, the works, in addition to comic-style onomatopoeia. If you don't like "POW" and "WHAM" jumping out at you like the Christian preachers in your local town centre, Pilgrim will either have you liking them by Stockholm syndrome or send you on a murder rampage ending with sniping Adam West from a clock tower.
Said evil exes are, like every good videogame boss, eclectically designed. The first, Matthew Patel (Satya Bhabha, the only Brit in the cast), summons "demon hipster chicks" and attacks in a Bollywood-style dance number; Todd Ingram, who as played by Brandon Routh damn near steals the show with his lunkheaded attempts at being badass, has veganism-induced psychic powers. Roxy Richter (Mae Whitman, aka Tinkerbell), the only girl in the League of Evil Exes, is a "bi-furious" ninja girl brandishing a knife-belt rather similar to Ivy from Soul Calibur's weapon, and Japanese twins Kyle and Ken Katayanagi (Shota and Keita Saito) challenge Sex Bob-Omb to a Battle of the Bands that involves summoning dragons from keyboards and - YES! - amps that go up to XI. The film moves between these battles at a brisk pace, but not at the expense of the characters. And good thing too, because past all the flash and whizz-bang fun, this is actually quite the compelling look on relationships.
No, really.
One of the strengths of the film is that, despite what the posters and trailers might want you to think, you're not expected to like Scott straight away, but God knows that won't stop the Cera fangirls. While he's 22, he's also lazy, slow to catch on, immature and fickle; when the film opens, he's in a relationship with Chinese schoolgirl Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), a name that Tarantino wishes he'd came up with and one any sane person would run away from at top speed - more or less because she's cute as a button and is so hopelessly in love with Scott she's Sex Bob-Omb's only fan. Then, he falls for Ramona after she literally passes through his dreams - apparently Scott's head is a convenient subspace highway she uses for deliveries; don't try and figure out why, considering this is a film where people burst into coins upon defeat - and only breaks up with Knives after his roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin stealing the show with fantastically witty one-liners) forces him to. In many ways, this is Cera sending up his doe-eyed sensitive nice guy role that's made about a quarter of the world's population sick to the back teeth of him.
In other words, he's a great match for Ramona. While she's much more world-weary and has a more laconic personality, the League of Evil Exes only came about because she picked up lovers on a whim; she broke up with one so she could go out with another, and dismisses her "sexy phase" with Roxy as nothing important. It becomes clear later on that Ramona's packing more baggage than just the League, and states that she needs a simpler, nicer guy to be with.
Keeping that in mind, it's possible to see this as taking place entirely within Scott's dream process - kind of like Inception, only not so tricksy. The world of Pilgrim is one where people have superpowers and martial arts expertise, where decisions for the future are settled through real-life rounds of Street Fighter, and nobody seems to question this. When you think about it, this could be exactly the way a guy like Scott, who prides himself on learning the bassline from Final Fantasy II, sees the world. The fights with the League are simply how he sees it within his own mind, contextualising it in a way he understands, and this becomes not just a fight for love, but a way of forcing him to straighten up, stop being such a whiny lazeabout, and start being the nice guy Ramona needs.
Granted, the film isn't perfect. The film is based on the entire six-volume comic book series and much effort has been made to compress it in just under two hours. Wright and fellow screenwriter Michael Bacall do a damn good job in doing so whilst still making it entertaining, but it does mean the last act feels rushed, especially since the battle with the Katayanagi twins is skimmed over in comparison to the time spent with the Big Bad Gideon Gordon Graves (a wonderfully smug Jason Schwartzmann). In turn, this leaves the fates of some characters unresolved, like the other members of Sex Bob-Omb and Scott's own Evil Ex, Envy Adams (Brie Larson), but that last part might be just me. These complaints are relatively minor and you'll be so swept up in the film's pace that you won't really care.
Speaking as a man who has nearly 4 hours worth of Final Fantasy music on iTunes, I loved it. However, this isn't a film for everyone, the visual style will no doubt be seen by some as too clever for its own good and the sheer geek appeal that oozes from every pore may put off others. But from what I can gather, the fact that when I tried to see this on opening day only for it to be sold out does mean its finding an audience. The fact that the director is the guy responsible for Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz probably helps. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is one of the most original films you'll see this year, and one that Hollywood will no doubt try and replicate (but fail to capture in the process), so go see it now to see what the fuss is about before it becomes the new "in" thing and hundreds of clones stagnate the market.
No comments:
Post a Comment