Colossal
(2016)
(SPOILERS) There’s usually a sinking feeling attached to any
movie when you realise you’re being preached at, and by implication, it often
doesn’t reflect that well on the storytelling skills of the preacher. Colossal’s a movie that works much
better while you’re trying to figure out where it’s going, rather than once you
know. Which means a good deal of it is very good, but also that its backend
falls out.
I’m no stranger to disappointing Nacho Vigalondo movies,
though, or indeed ones that are acclaimed – as Colossal has been – that didn’t quite do it for me. I was in the
same boat with his debut Timecrimes.
The subsequent Extraterrestrial was
likeable but slight. Open Windows,
I’ve yet to witness. Vigalondo was guided in his premise by his experience of
GamerGate, something I’ve only really encountered through tangential editorials,
and its accompanying themes of toxic masculinity and misogyny. The problem is, once
these elements are foregrounded in Colossal,
Vigalondo doesn’t seem to have the distance to either integrate them as fluidly
as he has juggled the (bizzaro) disparate elements and tones announced thus far
or resolve them in a considered, rather than showboating, manner. I’m not fond
of the term SJW, but the manner in which he delivers the final third of the movie
suggests his crusading instincts got the better of him.
Alcoholic Gloria (Anne Hathaway), thrown out by boyfriend
Tim (Dan Stevens), returns to her hometown and promptly encounters seemingly
nice, generous, retiring childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudekis), who offers her
a job at his bar. Which would seem par for the romcom course if not for the
prologue scene in which a giant monster is seen in Seoul 25 years earlier. Said
monster again appears in Seoul, uncannily at the points when Gloria has been
out on a bender and ends up in a children’s playground. When she eventually
tells her drinking buddies, including Joel (Austin Stowell) and Garth (Tim
Blake Nelson), that she thinks she is unwittingly controlling the monster, they
join her on site, only to discover that Oscar’s presence magics an additional
giant robot into existence in the city.
There’s some very funny and well observed material during
this early section. Gloria is alternatively both unsympathetic and likeable
while Oscar, despite micro warning signs (he’s been tracking her life while
she’s been away; he fails to empathise with the carnage wreaked on Seoul) is an
affable guy who seems to genuinely want to help her out (Hathaway is expectedly
strong, but Sudekis is a revelation, up to the point where one-note villainy
takes over in the final stages). The metaphor of out-of-control behaviour
(well, it’s too foregrounded to be called a metaphor) having wider consequences
isn’t subtle but it is amusingly conveyed, and the avatar aspect fits neatly
enough on those detachedly slugging it out under the cloak of the Internet
rather than in the real world.
But I think the picture – ironically, as this is Vigalondo’s
entire point – loses something when the focus shifts from Gloria. The director,
in envisaging Oscar, said he imagined what he might be like if he’d never made
it as a moviemaker and became stuck and jealously twisted in his hometown.
Sudekis meanwhile, commented “I hate it
when the bad guy is the bad guy from the very beginning”, but the lurch
here is so extreme (and yes, I know many would say that’s the point, but it
doesn’t need moustache-twirling with it; there are even photographs with Oscar’s
ex’s face scratched out, which is movie textbook psycho), it feels almost
polemicised. This isn’t comparable to Something
Wild, say, where you can tell Ray Liotta is a powder keg from the first
time you see him, but it has too much ground to make up reaching a similarly
unhinged end point.
Indeed, Hathaway was given the underwhelming soundbite that
this is illustrative of “why you
shouldn’t give hateful men great amounts of power”, which rather reduces
the picture to “Duh” motivation, as does a woman pulling herself out from under
“traditional male bullshit”. So much
so, that all the other men (with the possible exception of Garth) have to be
arseholes to illustrate the point; Oscar is only the worst, metaphorically and
literally attempting to trap her into an abusive relationship (or he will stomp
on Seoul every morning). So Tim, who entirely reasonably had enough of Gloria
in the first scene, is later recharacterised as an obsessive who can’t let go
of her (Gloria is right to be surprised by this, as it’s something a non
sequitur development). Joel, meanwhile, who has had his own one-night
entanglement with her, sits by and lets Oscar launch in on her verbally,
because for Gloria to regain her self-respect, the wastrel men all need to underline Vigalondo’s
overstated point.
The irony of this is that Gloria loses out on proper
development because the picture stops being about her solving her problems and
sorting her life out and instead becomes all about Oscar, who proceeds to take
over the story (again, you could argue that’s the point, but I rather think it
does a disservice to your main character). It’s a prime example of a story that
begins cleverly, sharply, nuanced even (even if it looks like the initial
alcoholism metaphor is as clumsy as the metaphor it becomes), but then the
message overtakes the telling. Vigalondo even devolves the rationale into all
men being bastards because Gloria had her school project stamped on as a child;
it’s unnecessarily trite that these are the seeds of Oscar’s jealousy, that she
was better than him even then.
Sure, it’s understandable that Vigalondo’s distaste with the
kind of behaviour and sentiments he witnessed during GamerGate have led to this
narrative, but his response is disappointingly unrestrained, boorishly unsubtle,
even. Such that, when Gloria figures out a way to defeat Oscar, it comes complete
with a Jerry Bruckheimer or Joel Silver fist-pumping moment of her giant
monster self tossing Oscar to his death after he unrepentantly screams “Put me down you bitch!” (Vigalondo
partially acquiesced to Hathaway asking him to tone down Gloria’s response, but
I don’t think it was enough). The scene is symptomatic of “empowerment” moments
designed by men to show they’re in touch with women (cf James Cameron).
I came away thinking there were almost two movies crammed
into Colossal, one of which I liked
very much, the other I didn’t care for at all. One was inventive and quite clever,
the other blundering and preachy. Vigalondo comes up with interesting ideas,
I’ll definitely give him that. He just needs to work on the follow-through.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.
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