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

Mondo bizarro. No offence man, but you’re in way over your head.

The X-Files 8.7: Via Negativa I wasn’t as down on the last couple of seasons of The X-Files as most seemed to be. For me, the mythology arc walked off a cliff somewhere around the first movie, with only the occasional glimmer of something worthwhile after that. So the fact that the show was tripping over itself with super soldiers and Mulder’s abduction/his and Scully’s baby (although we all now know it wasn’t, sheesh ), anything to stretch itself beyond breaking point in the vain hope viewers would carry on dangling, didn’t really make much odds. Of course, it finally snapped with the wretched main arc when the show returned, although the writing was truly on the wall with Season 9 finale The Truth . For the most part, though, I found 8 and 9 more watchable than, say 5 or 7. They came up with their fair share of engaging standalones, one of which I remembered to be Via Negativa .

Schnell, you stinkers! Come on, raus!

Private’s Progress (1956) (SPOILERS) Truth be told, there’s good reason sequel I’m Alright Jack reaps the raves – it is, after all, razor sharp and entirely focussed in its satire – but Private’s Progress is no slouch either. In some respects, it makes for an easy bedfellow with such wartime larks as Norman Wisdom’s The Square Peg (one of the slapstick funny man’s better vehicles). But it’s also, typically of the Boulting Brothers’ unsentimental disposition, utterly remorseless in rebuffing any notions of romantic wartime heroism, nobility and fighting the good fight. Everyone in the British Army is entirely cynical, or terrified, or an idiot.

Isn’t it true, it’s easier to be a holy man on the top of a mountain?

The Razor’s Edge (1984) (SPOILERS) I’d hadn’t so much a hankering as an idle interest in finally getting round to seeing Bill Murray’s passion project. Partly because it seemed like such an odd fit. And partly because passion isn’t something you tend to associate with any Murray movie project, involving as it usually does laidback deadpan. Murray, at nigh-on peak fame – only cemented by the movie he agreed to make to make this movie – embarks on a serious-acting-chops dramatic project, an adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s story of one man’s journey of spiritual self-discovery. It should at least be interesting, shouldn’t it? A real curio? Alas, not. The Razor’s Edge is desperately turgid.

It’s not as if she were a… maniac, a raving thing.

Psycho (1960) (SPOILERS) One of cinema’s most feted and most studied texts, and for good reason. Even if the worthier and more literate psycho movie of that year is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom . One effectively ended a prolific director’s career and the other made its maker more in demand than ever, even if he too would discover he had peaked with his populist fear flick. Pretty much all the criticism and praise of Psycho is entirely valid. It remains a marvellously effective low-budget shocker, one peppered with superb performances and masterful staging. It’s also fairly rudimentary in tone, character and psychology. But those negative elements remain irrelevant to its overall power.

My Doggett would have called that crazy.

The X-Files 9.4: 4-D I get the impression no one much liked Agent Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish), but I felt, for all the sub-Counsellor Troi, empath twiddling that dogged her characterisation, she was a mostly positive addition to the series’ last two years (of its main run). Undoubtedly, pairing her with Doggett, in anticipation of Gillian Anderson exiting just as David Duchovny had – you rewatch these seasons and you wonder where her head was at in hanging on – made for aggressively facile gender-swapped conflict positions on any given assignment. And generally, I’d have been more interested in seeing how two individuals sympathetic to the cause – her and Mulder – might have got on. Nevertheless, in an episode like 4-D you get her character, and Doggett’s, at probably their best mutual showing.

You have done well to keep so much hair, when so many’s after it.

Jeremiah Johnson (1972) (SPOILERS) Hitherto, I was most familiar with Jeremiah Johnson in the form of a popular animated gif of beardy Robert Redford smiling and nodding in slow zoom close up (a moment that is every bit as cheesy in the film as it is in the gif). For whatever reason, I hadn’t mustered the enthusiasm to check out the 1970s’ The Revenant until now (well, beard-wise, at any rate). It’s easy to distinguish the different personalities at work in the movie. The John Milius one – the (mythic) man against the mythic landscape; the likeably accentuated, semi-poetic dialogue – versus the more naturalistic approach favoured by director Sydney Pollack and star Redford. The fusion of the two makes for a very watchable, if undeniably languorous picture. It was evidently an influence on Dances with Wolves in some respects, although that Best Picture Oscar winner is at greater pains to summon a more sensitive portrayal of Native Americans (and thus, perversely, at times a more patr

You’re a disgrace, sir... Weren’t you at Harrow?

Our Man in Marrakesh aka Bang! Bang! You’re Dead (1966) (SPOILERS) I hadn’t seen this one in more than three decades, and I had in mind that it was a decent spy spoof, well populated with a selection of stalwart British character actors in supporting roles. Well, I had the last bit right. I wasn’t aware this came from the stable of producer Harry Alan Towers, less still of his pedigree, or lack thereof, as a sort of British Roger Corman (he tried his hand at Star Wars with The Shape of Things to Come and Conan the Barbarian with Gor , for example). More legitimately, if you wish to call it that, he was responsible for the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu flicks. Our Man in Marrakesh – riffing overtly on Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana in title – seems to have in mind the then popular spy genre and its burgeoning spoofs, but it’s unsure which it is; too lightweight to work as a thriller and too light on laughs to elicit a chuckle.

I don't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.

North by Northwest (1959) (SPOILERS) North by Northwest gets a lot of attention as a progenitor of the Bond formula, but that’s giving it far too little credit. Really, it’s the first modern blockbuster, paving the way for hundreds of slipshod, loosely plotted action movies built around set pieces rather than expertly devised narratives. That it delivers, and delivers so effortlessly, is a testament to Hitchcock, to writer Ernest Lehmann, and to a cast who make the entire implausible exercise such a delight.

The best thing in the world for the inside of a man or a woman is the outside of a horse.

Marnie (1964) (SPOILERS) Hitch in a creative ditch. If you’ve read my Vertigo review, you’ll know I admired rather than really liked the picture many fete as his greatest work. Marnie is, in many ways, a redux, in the way De Palma kept repeating himself in the early 80s only significantly less delirious and… well, compelling. While Marnie succeeds in commanding the attention fitfully, it’s usually for the wrong reasons. And Hitch, digging his heels in as he strives to fashion a star against public disinterest – he failed to persuade Grace Kelly out of retirement for Marnie Rutland – comes entirely adrift with his leads.

Look out the window. Eden’s not burning, it’s burnt.

Reign of Fire (2002) (SPOILERS) There was good reason to believe Rob Bowman would make a successful transition from top-notch TV director to top-notch film one. He had, after all, attracted attention and plaudits for Star Trek: The Next Generation and become such an integral part of The X-File s that he was trusted with the 1998 leap to the big screen. That movie wasn’t the hit it might have been – I suspect because, such was Chris Carter’s inability to hone a coherent arc, it continued to hedge its bets – but Bowman showed he had the goods. And then came Reign of Fire . And then Elektra . And that was it. Reign of Fire is entirely competently directed, but that doesn’t prevent it from being entirely lousy.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog