Colossal (2017)

Colossal (2017)

IMDB Rating 6.7/10 (as on 01.04.2017)

A woman discovers that severe catastrophic events are somehow connected to the mental breakdown from which she's suffering.

Director: Nacho Vigalondo

Writer: Nacho Vigalondo

Stars: Dan Stevens, Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis

R | 1h 50min | Action, Comedy, Sci-Fi

IMDB link Here

  

Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis rekindle an old friendship while giant monsters terrorize Seoul in this sci-fi oddity directed by Nacho Vigalondo.

Hathaway plays Gloria, an alcoholic New Yorker whose boyfriend (Dan Stevens) is fed up with her out-all-night benders. He throws her out of his luxe pad; penniless, she retreats to her family's now-abandoned small-town home. There she crosses paths with Oscar (Sudeikis), a childhood friend now running his family's bar. Perfect place for Gloria to get her act together, right? Soon she's both a waitress and a patron, lingering every night for after-hours drinking sessions with Oscar and his buddies (Tim Blake Nelson and Austin Stowell).

Gloria awakens one afternoon to find the world in a panic: TV news is full of footage of a giant monster that showed up in Seoul, made some weird hand gestures and vanished in a cloud of lightning. It appears again the next night at the same time, 8:05, and soon Gloria realizes that these appearances sync up to the moments she has stumbled home on the other side of the world, straggling drunkenly through an empty playground. The monster mirrors her every movement while she's in the sandbox there. After coming to terms with this, she demonstrates it to her drinking buddies. Then the giant robot appears.

Don't get your hopes up: This monster's origin makes less sense than a third-rate superhero's, and the idea that nobody involved remembers the events is a huge head-scratcher. But suspension of disbelief is already a must in a film which claims the residents of Seoul would just stick around at home despite nightly visitations from monsters who threaten to crush them.

Though he's clearly more interested in his human characters than the mayhem in South Korea, Vigalondo's screenplay only sketches them out, making it hard for Hathaway and Sudeikis to justify some of their dumber and more outrageous behavior. Few viewers will enjoy seeing Sudeikis set his own bar on fire, for instance, and only slightly more of them will believe it. Still, the cast's likability keeps us on board, watching the sometimes baffling behavior onscreen just like those on the streets of Seoul, who gape up at a monster in horror but can't make themselves flee to the suburbs.

 Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

Movie rating ★★☆☆☆  

Anne Hathaway's madcap monster movie plays it too safe

To call Colossal tonally uneven would perhaps be missing the entire point of Colossal. For months now, the staggeringly odd premise has been the source of feverish online discussion and intense confusion. She did what? And has a what? But how could that? The answers are here and, well, they’re far from befitting of that title ...

On paper, there’s quite literally nothing like Colossal. Writer/director Nacho Vigalondo deserves immediate plaudits for crafting a premise that reads like Rachel Getting Married meets Godzilla (in fact, the film’s resemblance to the latter led to a lawsuit) and the leftfield genre shift comes as a refreshing change, after another particularly dull set of summer blockbusters. But, given the bizarro conceit, there’s something surprisingly, and frustratingly, safe about the film.

Admittedly, in the outset this is rather deliberate. Vigalondo shoots it like a charming Fox Searchlight indie about a woman rediscovering herself and while it’s fun to see this cosey first act make a hard left into b-movie territory, it’s also difficult not to find the characters and interplay just as cloying and familiar as they are in the film it’s initially pretending to ape. But there doesn’t seem to be much of a sense of irony and, instead, we’re expected to invest in these paper-thin stock indie movie types, finding their cutesy conversations to be relatable.

When the monster mash-up eventually ensues, it’s a welcome relief and provides an unusual spin on a familiar tale but there remains a nagging feeling that none of this is quite as sharp as it should be. Jokes fall flat, comedy is overly broad and nuance is at a bare minimum. As Gloria delves deeper into the reason why she’s connected to a giant monster destroying South Korea, there are interesting ideas about self-importance during times of internal struggle and the gap between those who moved away and those who stayed in their hometown. But they’re half-explored and ultimately rejected for an unlikely and underdeveloped rivalry that leads to the appearance of a giant robot ...

Hathaway remains an engaging presence as ever but Gloria’s journey is overly, boringly simplified with her alcoholism and personal issues given a glossy Nancy Meyers makeover. It remains a surprise throughout that the film feels like such studio product, given the potentially edgy small-scale drama it could have been. It does result in the giant creature looking blockbuster-worthy but it leaves the edges feeling smoothed out.

Colossal remains something of a fascinating misfire and quite easily the hardest film to market this year. It’s a tantalising missed opportunity because if you’re going to make a film about a woman with a psychic connection to a giant city-crushing monster, it should definitely be weirder than this.

Read full review at The Guardian