Hi, I'm the robot. She's the monster.

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.

Comments

Believe me, Mr Bond, I could shoot you from Stuttgart und still create ze proper effect.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
(SPOILERS) Some of the reactions to Spectre would have you believe it undoes all the “good” work cementing Daniel Craig’s incarnation of Bond in Skyfall. If you didn’t see that picture as the second coming of the franchise (I didn’t) your response to the latest may not be so harsh, despite its less successful choices (Blofeld among them). And it isn’t as if one step, forward two steps back are anything new in perceptions of the series (or indeed hugely divisive views on what even constitutes a decent Bond movie). After the raves greeting Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan suffered a decidedly tepid response to his second outing, Tomorrow Never Dies, albeit it was less eviscerated than Craig’s sophomore Quantum of Solace. Tomorrow’s reputation disguises many strong points, although it has to be admitted that a Moore-era style finale and a floundering attempt to package in a halcyon villain aren’t among them.

The Bond series’ flirtations with contemporary relevance have a…

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989)
(SPOILERS) There’s Jaws, there’s Star Wars, and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy, to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “mainly boring”.

Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the system when Burton did it (even…

Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honour – which is probably more than she ever did.

Duck Soup (1933)
(SPOILERS) Not for nothing is Duck Soup acclaimed as one of the greatest comedies ever, and while you’d never hold it against Marx Brothers movies for having little in the way of coherent plotting in – indeed, it’s pretty much essential to their approach – the presence of actual thematic content this time helps sharpen the edges of both their slapstick and their satire.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

On account of you, I nearly heard the opera.

A Night at the Opera (1935)
(SPOILERS) The Marx Brothers head over to MGM, minus one Zeppo, and despite their variably citing A Night at the Opera as their best film, you can see – well, perhaps not instantly, but by about the half-hour mark – that something was undoubtedly lost along the way. It isn’t that there’s an absence of very funny material – there’s a strong contender for their best scene in the mix – but that there’s a lot else too. Added to which, the best of the very funny material can be found during the first half of the picture.

I still think it’s a terrible play, but it makes a wonderful rehearsal.

Room Service (1938)
(SPOILERS) The Marx Brothers step away from MGM for a solitary RKO outing, and a scarcely disguised adaption of a play to boot. Room Service lacks the requisite sense of anarchy and inventiveness of their better (earlier) pictures – even Groucho’s name, Gordon Miller, is disappointingly everyday – but it’s nevertheless an inoffensive time passer.

This better not be some 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea shit, man.

Underwater (2020)
(SPOILERS) There’s no shame in a quality B-movie, or in an Alien rip-off done well. But it’s nevertheless going to need that something extra to make it truly memorable in its own right. Underwater, despite being scuppered at the box office, is an entirely respectable entry in both those arenas from director William Eubank, but like the recent Life (which, in fairness, had an ending that very nearly elevated it to the truly memorable), it can’t quite go that extra mile, or summon that much needed sliver of inspiration to set it apart.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

Goodbye, Mr Chimps.

At the Circus (1939)
(SPOILERS) This is where the brothers sink into their stretch of middling MGM movies, now absent the presence of their major supporter Irving Thalberg; it’s probably for the best this wasn’t called A Day at the Circus, as it would instantly have drawn unflattering comparisons with the earlier MGM pair that gave them their biggest hits. Nevertheless, there’s enough decent material to keep At the Circus fairly sprightly (rather than “fairly ponderous”, as Pauline Kael put it).

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog