MOVIES
The flaws are writ large in the perplexing ‘Colossal’, but, as with a car crash, it’s hard to avert your gaze. By
You’ve got to see this one to believe it
There’s a lot going on in this strange, perplexing but still intriguing film by director Nacho Vigalondo. The alwaysengaging Anne Hathaway (she of the good looks and the impish eyes) plays Gloria — an alcoholic whose behaviour has tested her boyfriend Tim’s patience too far (Dan Stevens — he of the fluttering hearts that kept the first seasons of Downton Abbey firmly in the ratings). When Gloria loses her job and Tim kicks her out of their New York apartment, Gloria is forced to move back to her small home town. There she reconnects with her childhood buddy Oscar (Jason Sudeikis — mainstream comedy’s nice guy with a bit of a bad-boy streak) who gives her a job in his bar. This, obviously, is not good for her alcohol problem but seemingly good for her social status.
All seems well as Gloria spends her days serving drunks and her evenings becoming one in the company of good ‘ole friends she hasn’t had time to reconnect with.
And then … well … let me try my best to explain this: a Godzillastyle monster wreaks havoc on Seoul in South Korea. It turns out that somehow, this monster is connected to Gloria — her inner personal demons writ large perhaps.
When another monster appears to cause more trouble for the
South Koreans than an early morning Kim Jung-un missile strike, it turns out that monster No 2 is somehow connected to Oscar. While some addicts may have to deal with metaphorical monkeys on their backs, these two have to negotiate literal city-destroying hundred-foot monsters on theirs.
This all makes for a story that’s sort of a parody of the monster film genre, sort of an allegory about addiction and sort of an all over the place mess that’s still somehow fascinating and hard to look away from in a very car crash kind of way.
It’s as if Vigalondo threw as many different genres as he could think of against a wall and then figured well what the heck, why not? The answer to that question is that the reason not to make what one reviewer has described as “a sci- fi/ horror/ psychodrama/ comedy/ thriller/ revenge/ romance film” is that it’s pretty much impossible to satisfy the requirements of all of those genres within an almost twohour story that’s supposed to make sense to an audience.
While Hathaway and Sudeikis give spirited performances that manage not to make us laugh at the sheer absurdity of the material, they can’t quite save the film from collapsing into a rushed finale that doesn’t really satisfy any answers to the film’s intention. Is it a satire of a variety of genres, a parable about the clichéd need to say no to the things that make us drink or a goofy love story in which two normal people get to exercise the fantasy that they’re somehow more important than they ever could be in their own world?
Your guess is as good as mine and it’s not helped by the fact that neither of the two protagonists’ behaviours and addictions seem to warrant such extreme avatars. Gloria and Oscar are hardly Kate Moss and Pete Doherty.
It’s certainly more intriguing than a number of fantasy/ sci-fi/ comedy/ thriller/ revenge/ romances in recent memory. Unfortunately in the end it’s a little too unfocused and unconvincing to make much of a clear point about anything. But it’s still worth watching for its sheer bravado and insanity, if nothing else.
It’s still worth watching for its sheer bravado and insanity, if nothing else