achievement unlocked: scott pilgrim movie review

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

Review By Chris Nolen

Bringing a cherished cult property to life on film must be a terrifying prospect. In many ways, it's an impossible task. If you are too faithful to the idiosyncratic bits of original material, you lose mass appeal. If you fail to capture the minutia and the spirit of the property, then you alienate the core fan base. The further out and more obscure it is, the more polarizing this effect becomes. Likewise, it is difficult to be a fan because you want to support when a talented and respectful team do their best...but you must understand that some sacrifices must be offered up to commercial success. It is a very rare and special piece of film that casts its lot completely with the fans...choosing to do so because the team making it has that much faith in the material and the studio is farsighted enough to understand the long-term bet is good even if it doesn't dominate the box office.

All I could think while watching Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was "How the hell did this get made?" I mean, I just can't grasp how a movie based on a relatively obscure comic property with such completely non-traditional storytelling devices could be greeenlit and make it onto a heavily marketed summer release slot. Yet here we are, and that move totally got made. Director Edgar Wright (Shaun of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, Spaced) has, for better or worse, made an incredibly faithful translation of the comic, capturing not only the spirit and nearly frame-by-frame accuracy, but all of the gaming culture references that filled the pages. Where Wright strayed from the comic, he seemed to do so only to add more fan service.

That isn't to say that it is an exact translation of the graphic novels. There are six fairly beefy volumes of storytelling compressed into the under two-hour running time, so that would have been impossible. But the amount that Wright does squeeze in and make work as well as he does is pretty amazing. Some things have been changed or shuffled around to account for the truncated timeline, but somehow these big moments come through faithfully and in some cases better than in the novels. Think of this movie as kind of a "greatest hits" from the novels, remixed and remastered in high-fidelity.

Not to spend too much time on the story recap, as the trailers do a pretty good job of getting you up to speed. This 20-something kid named Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) falls for a day-glow haired girl named Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who has some baggage. Seven evil pieces of baggage. And they all want to kill Scott Pilgrim. The result is a spectacle of game-inspired battles that bring Scott stage-by-stage to winning the girl. The brilliance of the novels and the film is that all this fighting is really a metaphor for dealing with the crap that comes with a new relationship: learning about how awesome your new squeeze's exes were, the insecurities that come with that, as well as some of your own skeletons coming out to play. The video game-style presentation is the lens through which Scott views the world. He is part of a generation that grew up gaming...a generation whose lexicon of references are just as based in Shinobi as Shakespeare...OK, probably more so.

It is in this connection to a generation that the novel's creator Bryan Lee O'Malley struck gold. It was the right story, at the right time, in the right format to engage that audience, and it was embraced and celebrated as a result. But O'Malley's material was more than fan service to that group...his story, essentially a romantic comedy, bridges cultural gaps and attracted readers from many other groups including females and fans from the gay community. It can be argued that these atypical readers could not only get, but believe the over-the-top presentation because you expect it in a graphic novel. Can the film also manage this trick given the live action portrayal of these crazy events? The box office will judge, but it is my suspicion that it will fail, to some degree, in this regard. It may very well be a victim of staying too close to the original material.

Visually, the film unfolds in gorgeously shot vibrancy. The editing is fast and inventive, splitting the screen  in various ways to emulate the comic, and skipping from scene to scene in expertly staged transitions. It is at times chaotic, but mesmerizing. The comic and gaming references are literally integrated and superimposed over the action, creating a unique and dynamic feast for the eyes. But it is in all this craziness that the film may lose some viewers. This reviewer read the comics beforehand, so I knew all the story beats. But I suspect that a newcomer might simply be overwhelmed by all that is coming at them. The gaming and pop-culture cues are heavy, at times, and if you don't know what they are referencing, you might feel left out of the big in-joke. In short, if you aren't a gamer, you might not "get it." The story's romantic moments help, but unlike the novel, these moments aren't given nearly enough time to build into something compelling enough to entice those looking for a good romantic yarn. Where the novels straddled the line between fandom engaging action and core-relationships, the movie casts its lot heavily on the fandom side.

But as movies go, I'm glad that Wright sided with the fans. Fuck the masses. We've seen a million romantic comedies. But how many bass battles have we seen on film? How many pee meters have we ever seen depleted on celluloid? How many times have we seen a battle of the bands turn into a Pokemon battle? The answer to all the above, and so many more, is never. Never have audiences seen anything like this in a movie, much less a major Hollywood release. And if it fails, we may never again. And as I bask in the afterglow of the amazing things I witnessed on screen tonight, I still sit here wondering "how the hell did this get made?" I can't really answer that, but I'm sure glad it did.