Ant’s Rant:Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Movie Review

Finally the movie adap­ta­tion to the cult graphic novel hit is here to rock our socks off. Releas­ing just in time to fin­ish off the sum­mer along with The Expend­ables, will this film be worth the tokens required to play, or will it be KO’ed by the new chal­lenger? How will this hold up as an adap­ta­tion for a graphic novel that’s essen­tially an action-packed gamer’s wet dream? Click through for my take on the prod­uct of awk­ward Michael Cera and the crew behind the British zom­bie hit Shaun of the Dead.

This week­end saw the release of The Expend­ables, sup­pos­edly the action movie to end all action movies with an all-star big-name cast like no other, and Scott Pil­grim Vs. The World, a Cana­dian roman­tic com­edy with enough fight­ing to offi­cially clas­sify it as an action film as well. I had the oppor­tu­nity to spend today watch­ing both back to back today, and I can tell you between the two, Scott Pil­grim wins out with a 64-hit combo that Expend­ables just doesn’t have a combo breaker for. The Expend­ables had some ridicu­lous kick-ass action and a cast to make you shit your­self, but that’s really all it had going for it. Every­thing else was just bor­ing and for­get­table. Half the cast was even under­uti­lized which made for a huge dis­ap­point­ment. That is a story for a dif­fer­ent time, though.

Scott Pil­grim vs The World has so much fan ser­vice that it’s almost impos­si­ble for a fan to be dis­ap­pointed in it. It has enough well-done fight scenes and var­ied bat­tles as well as spe­cial effects that don’t dis­ap­point to keep non-fans and new-comers inter­ested and enter­tained. The work done on this movie really shows a love for its source mate­r­ial, as it stays VERY close to the source down to the very last detail, even if there were some changes int he story to make it more suit­able for a movie. Speak­ing of story changes, this is hon­estly one of the few films where I can accept most of them with­out complaint.

One fac­tor that had me skep­ti­cal about the film pre-release (even though I was still excited) was Michael Cera. He’s an awk­ward actor I just never could find to be funny or even enter­tain­ing. I’ve always found his char­ac­ter to be very shal­low and sim­ple, and frankly I always hated him. This movie slightly redeemed him thanks to Edgar Wright’s writ­ing and direc­tion. Most of the dia­logue was lifted straight from the books, so this helped Michael immensely in really con­vinc­ingly becom­ing the char­ac­ter. Scott Pil­grim him­self is a very awk­ward and gen­uinely nice and sen­si­tive guy, which is very sim­i­lar to the type of char­ac­ter Cera’s been play­ing all along. Michael was actu­ally just about made for this role.

Another worry I had was how they were going to fit so much action into one 2 hour movie. The books had about 11 action sequences, so it didn’t seem pos­si­ble for all of them to make it into the movie and have them be sat­is­fy­ing or even all that good. Under­stand­ably, that was cut down to 7 so they could be as sat­is­fy­ing and incred­i­ble as pos­si­ble. There were some changes in place­ment within the story so that it all made more sense. Two of the book’s bat­tles were placed into the same scene, and this hap­pened twice. It gives the viewer more action at one time and keeps the film within a rea­son­able run­ning time. These changes also made for bet­ter pac­ing and kept unnec­es­sary details out of the story. For instance, Mr. Chau’s pur­suit wasn’t nec­es­sary to the story being con­veyed, and the Hon­est Ed’s trial wasn’t really needed (though I’d have loved to see that, per­son­ally, as it was one of the fun­ni­est parts in the books).

The fight chore­og­ra­phy was great, espe­cially since most of the actors have had absolutely no expe­ri­ence in mar­tial arts or action sequences and per­formed so well and con­vinc­ingly that it kept me cheer­ing and grin­ning the whole way. The spe­cial effects were any­thing but cheep and were done in humor­ous and visu­ally strik­ing ways. Between the Batman-style comic book words (“POW!” “CRACK!” “FWOOM!”) to the video game influ­enced pop-ups (combo hit-counter, expe­ri­ence points, spe­cial pow­ers like fire­balls and sum­mons, River City Ransom-inspired coin drops from defeated foes, etc) to the direct comic ref­er­ences (Scott’s hair­cut story, Ramona’s evil ex sto­ries, the black word pan­els thrown around), there was a lot of effects that really added to the experience.

Don’t get me wrong, this movie isn’t per­fect. One of the things it lacks is char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. In the books, a few char­ac­ters and up going through some changes that are just not in the movie what­so­ever. Exam­ples being, Stephen Stills goes through a huge change by the end of the 6th book, Scott’s liv­ing sit­u­a­tion and employ­ment sta­tus all change through­out the series, and Envy Adams is totally dif­fer­ent from when Scott first meets her to when we leave her off in the series. I under­stand they had to fit a lot of action into two hours, but they could have found some way to add those details in. All good sto­ries need char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, and this film lacks that.

Another thing I didn’t like was Ramona her­self. I didn’t even really like her in the comics, but just see­ing her in live action I felt like all I’d want to do is give her my 1-up mush­room and then leave her in another cas­tle. In the books she ends up leav­ing Scott for per­sonal rea­sons dur­ing the 5th book and Scott goes through a long depres­sion until he wins her back in the 6th book. I didn’t like that she’d leave him after all he’s done for her, and I don’t like it now in the movie. The movie’s expla­na­tion for that was incred­i­bly lame and felt like a huge cop-out. Besides that, I just didn’t like the way her char­ac­ter was acted out. It was under­stand­able that the char­ac­ter feel flat and awk­ward dur­ing the first date, but for the whole movie she didn’t have to seem com­pletely dis­in­ter­ested in any­thing that was going on. I couldn’t feel the chem­istry with her at all, and it always felt com­pletely one-sided.

That aside, as a fan of the books, I had a whole hell of a lot of fun watch­ing this movie. I never found myself get­ting bored, and I always had some­thing else to laugh and cheer at. Placed next to The Expend­ables, I was more impressed with this movie. The Expend­ables had way too much old peo­ple bitch­ing and rem­i­nisc­ing about ancient his­tory we know noth­ing about, and not enough of the all-star cast doing what they do best. At least Scott Pil­grim always had the char­ac­ters doing some­thing funny or awe­some, and there was always an expla­na­tion for every­thing. All the explo­sions and semi-automatic shot­guns with explo­sive rounds in the world can’t save you when you’re spend­ing most of your time talk­ing about war sto­ries that nobody cares about.

Read the books, it’s not a long read. Go see this movie, you won’t be dis­ap­pointed unless you’re a huge stick­ler for char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and can’t look past Ramona Flow­ers. When you’re done, go play the game. If you’ve ever played River City Ran­som or Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles (or any game like it) you’ll have loads of fun. I rec­om­mend this film to any­one and every­one. Let this be the movie that you round out your sum­mer with.

Ant

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