Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a comic book movie about rock-n-roll, video games and falling in love. It’s frenetic and absurd, funny, sweet and fun, it claims to be “an epic of epic epicness” and you will most likely either love it or hate it. If you are a fan of indie rock, hipsters, comic books, graphic novels, manga, video games, cute girls or humor related to any of those things, then there’s a good chance you will like it. If you are into more than a few of the above items then this film might take up a permanent residence in your geeky little heart. However, if you don’t have a short attention span or if you can’t stand pop-up stats, info-graphics and other visual onscreen flourishes, then you will want to stay far, far away from this movie.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a typical boy sees girl, boy falls for girl, boy has to battle the girl’s exes in order to be with her kind of movie. You’re familiar with that type of story, right? ...No? Well, how can I most accurately describe it? Imagine if indie rock and comic books got together and had a kid… and then video games got together with manga and they had a kid. Now imagine that those two kids met each other, fell in love and made a kid of their own… well, that kid would pretty much be indistinguishable from this film. After a statement like that, you might think it’s impossible to cram any more geeky hipster coolness into this movie, but then you’d learn that the director is Edgar Wright, the same guy that co-wrote and directed both Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. And you would be wrong. (Wright is currently one of my favorite directors… I really like everything that he’s done so far.)
So, yeah, anyway, Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is immediately smitten with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and he must fight an assortment of her exes (Chris Evans, Brandon Routh and Jason Schwartzman, among others) because: "if you want something bad enough you have to fight for it." All of these fights are spectacles, consisting of (video-game-styled) kicking, punching brawls or musical battles (or both.) Speaking of the music, you know how most of the time when movies feature musicians, the onscreen music sucks? Well, in this film… it mostly doesn’t. There are a couple iffy musical moments, but, for the most part, it works. You know why? It’s because they got Beck, Broken Social Scene and Metric to write the songs for the bands in the film. (Plumtree and Blood Red Shoes also make mention-worthy appearances on the soundtrack.) The intro with Pilgrim’s band, Sex Bob-omb, is a rockin’ introduction to the music and the unique visual style of the film.
- Score
- 8/10
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is one of the more clever and funny movies to come out this year and I highly recommend seeing it. Several of the supporting actors have great little parts and Aubrey Plaza (who is always great in Parks and Recreation) is a definite highlight, (as usual.) There are, unfortunately, a couple jokes that fall so flat that they’d be impossible to scrape from the floor, but they are specifically pun-related and I’d prefer to forget they existed at all. There’s plenty of stuff that works well though and this film is worth your time and money… even if you only judge it from a purely visual standpoint.
