I think it's safe to say that there is no other movie like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It's one of the most madcap, high energy, relentless films I have ever seen. And it may also be brilliant. Films simply aren't told the way Scott Pilgrim is, so to see a film completely ignore the rules of film making so brazenly is liberating, if not a bit difficult to come to terms with. I've read the books upon which this is based, but even I was unsure of what to make of the movie for the first fifteen minutes or so. It was as if director Edgar Wright was incapable of letting a scene finish before he had already started the next one. Hell, sometimes it seemed as though one scene was simply happening on top of another. And yet, once I embraced the way the film was being told, it was exhilarating.Michael Cera is Scott Pilgrim, a twenty-something layabout who meets the girl of his dreams (literally), Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). The catch is, she comes with a lot of baggage in the form of seven evil exes that Scott must defeat. What follows is a cacophony of fights, songs, split screens, Vegan Police, giant sound wave monsters, explosions of coins, a studio audience, 8-bit studio logos, and more. And yet, it all serves a point. Unlike a film like Speed Racer, which assaults you for the sake of being abrasive, Scott Pilgrim uses its visual style to give us a better understanding of how Scott sees the world. His life is shaped (and stunted) by the video games, music, and comic books he enjoys. When he enters his apartment after a night with Ramona, it makes sense that in his mind he would enter to applause and cheers.
The film is fast paced, to say the least, but it gets across a lot of information and emotional depth as well. I was surprised how long it took the film to even get to the first fight scene, allowing us to meet our hero and his friends. The world in which Scott exists is fully realized and explored even before the first evil ex shows up to ruin the party. I will say that if there is one problem with the film, it's that Ramona remains so unknowable up until the end of the picture that you will find it hard to care for her. Now, that could be because we are seeing everything through Scott's eyes, as he himself isn't quite sure what to make of her. But that doesn't make it less difficult when you're trying to understand why Scott would put up with all the evil exes for her. The film ultimately comes to a point where he is fighting them more for himself than for her, but it still would have been nice to understand what it is that these two characters see in each other.
If the visual imagination on display is the high point of the film, the acting is a close second. Considering the genre, that's actually pretty amazing. While I was left cold by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (the point, I understand that), I was actually quite charmed by Michael Cera. While he isn't the Scott Pilgrim I envisioned when reading the books, he also isn't the Michael Cera I've seen in everything else Cera has made. He is rude, selfish, and aloof, and yet that makes him all the more endearing when he tries to come to terms with what is being foisted upon him. The various exes steal their limited screen time, with Brandon Routh and Chris Evans bringing a level of narcissism to their characters that make their downfall all the more hilarious. But the best performances in the film come from Kieran Culkin as Scott's gay roommate Wallace, and newcomer Ellen Wong as Scott's underage girlfriend Knives. The two throw themselves at their characters with such abandon that they rise above the goofiness to feel like the most fully realized people in the movie.
Edgar Wright is a man still early in his career, and yet it feels like he is a master of cinema in a way few people his age could ever hope to be. His vision for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is so fully realized that you never doubt the choices he makes with the film. And that is absolutely vital with material like this. If for even a second you don't buy what he is doing visually, the whole film collapses (again, Speed Racer). This is the kind of material that simply shouldn't translate to screen well, and the fact that Wright figured out how to translate it perfectly makes the film feel mildly revolutionary.
