Scott Pilgim Vs. The World (5 out of 5)

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is awesome, which begs the questions, as raised by Stephanie Zacharek in her negative review of Inception, if that is enough? A better response may be: so what? In the grand scheme of film and culture and art does awesome really amount to anything but a two hour confectionery that, like lightening, strikes with swift brilliant force and then is gone? It’s maybe the very problem that gnaws at all classical minded film critics as they forge on into the future. I guess, if we are to rate Scott Pilgrim in a vacuum, sealed off from the last hundred, or even ten, years of film history, the answer is that yes indeed, it’s awesomeness is truly enough, or at least under the (maybe sad?) realization that if most, if not all, films are becoming no more than flashes of noise and colour than they might as well at least strive to be cute and hip and funny and hurdle images at the screen that are just a little unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. So, there you go.

The story revolves around Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) a geeky bass player from Toronto who has just hooked up with a 17 year old Asian girl, Knives Chau, who also doubles as Pilgrim’s number one fan. His band is called Sex Bah Bomb and they play local gigs hoping that there will be at least one non-band member in attendance that hopes they won’t suck.

Then Scott lays eyes on the Technicolor haired Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and its love at first sight. He constantly dreams about her, stalks her at parties, ignores Knives who is so infatuated that she hardly notices and orders packages on Amazon just to fill the waste basket when he finds out she’s the delivery girl.

Eventually, Ramona agrees to go out with Scott but he soon finds that there’s a catch. She moved to Toronto from the U.S. in order to escape her past and rediscover herself. As it turns out, she is running from seven evil exes who have all teamed together into one league in order to fight Scott Pilgrim to the death. This makes up most of the body of the film despite the fact that a fight to the death is a fight to the death and an evil ex is an evil ex and once you’ve seen two or three you’ve seen about as many as you probably will ever need to.

The story isn’t a whole lot more complex than that. What makes it interesting is that its director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) takes great, excessive pains in order to make this material actually feel like a video game or a graphic novel. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, like Speed Racer before it, is one of the few films that know how to use special effects for all they are worth, creating, not so much a film, as, for better or worse, an experience that completely immerses you in it’s spell. Scott Pilgrim is a lot of things. Boring it is not.

If there’s any problem, it’s that Wright does too good of a job. He spends so much time on visual details: the split screens, the accompanying words that go with sounds like the phone ringing or the door knocking, the video game aesthetics, the bright lights and so on, that he kind of forgets to do anything with the material going on underneath.

Thankfully Wright is in the company of good stars who manages to make the material funny and sweet and give it a bit of a human element that can at least propel it for two hours. Michael Cera does his typical loveable goofball routine, Winstead is perky and cute while still always being one of those girls who can never quite be trusted to still be there the next day, Kieran Culkin plays deadpan of Scott’s gay roommate and gets away with it and Anna Kendrick shows up for a few scenes of quirky, fast talking funny business.

But a film like this doesn’t exist as its parts. It’s a whole package that you either let in or reject outright. It’s so busy that it doesn’t have much time for character or plot, but what a lightshow it provides. In the end, Wright has a good eye for visual comedy and Cera is as endearing a presence as any but the film ultimately rises and falls on just how spectacular and inventive it can be. It is spectacular. It is inventive. It’s also like nothing you’ve probably ever seen. Sometimes, that’s all it takes.