Hey, Ben here. The last thing the internet needs now is another Scott Pilgrim review, but I can’t pass up throwing in my two cents about this special movie. I promise we really do watch other movies, and we’ll even write about some of them soon.
Expectations are a funny thing. I’m one of the enamored masses whose unconditional love of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim graphic novels should make it difficult for me to watch Edgar Wright’s movie objectively. The previews for the Scott Pilgrim movie did a immaculate job of capturing the tone of the comic, and the casting was chocked full of frightening doppelgangers of cartoon characters. But that’s what the preview of Watchmen looked like, too. Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie looks exactly like the classic Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons comic book, and features the right characters moving through the right scenes reciting the correct dialogue. Whether it was due to Snyder’s inane superficiality or the inherent difficulty of adapting long form material into a 2 hour movie, Watchmen is a piece of garbage dressed up like your favorite comic book. In the lead up to Scott Pilgrim I assured myself that Edgar Wright is not Zack Snyder. Between Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz Edgar Wright hadn’t directed a bad movie yet. All the same, when the Scott Pilgrim trailer looked overzealously comic book-y, I had visions of the Watchmen disaster floating through my head.
Like I said, expectations and baggage are terrible things to bring into a movie. Let’s be realistic, though, it happens, it happened here, I’m over it. My love for the Scott Pilgrim comic in every way possible should have hindered my love for the movie. I should have spent hours complaining about what scenes they changed, or how Michael Cera is a bad casting choice for Scott, or how bad of an idea it was to cram 7 individual bad guys each with their own ‘episode’ into a single movie. But I didn’t. Edgar Wright kicks ass. He knocked this one out of the park.
The movie opens with a small sequence in which Scott introduces his bandmates to his new 17 year old girlfriend Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). Scott is 23, by the way, and his friends don’t let him forget it. Knives joins the band, Sex Bob-omb, at practice in a sequence that moves comfortably, allowing breathing room for laugh out loud jokes, awkwardness, and some totally badass rock’n’roll opening credits. That sense of pace, of taking your time, getting to know these interesting, idiosyncratic characters, and letting some grungy, dirty rock’n’roll nastiness play out in its entirety…these things are exactly what Scott Pilgrim has that other direct comic book adaptations don’t.
For fans of the book, I think this might take some getting used to. The one thing Edgar Wright does not do is reproduce a play by play of the book. The movie is beholden to its source material, but not neurotically so. He would rather discard large swaths of plot than have to cut short the nice moments like Sex Bob-omb’s first performance, or the witty, ridiculous interplay between Scott and his gay roommate Wallace (Kerian Culkin), or Scott’s awkwardly endearing first date with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Even in scenes and situations which are familiar to those who’ve read the comic, the actual jokes and lines are notably different. In every scenario, Edgar Wright focuses on what will make a great movie, not what made a great comic.
Specifically, the movie’s closing sentiments represent an almost radical departure from the source material. If there is one criticism of the movie that sticks, it’s that Ramona is a bit of a one-dimensional character, and often comes off as a selfish bitch rather than as a complicated human being who is damaged by still potentially capable of caring. Toward the end of the comic, Bryan Lee O’Malley spends a lot of time emphasizing Ramona’s internal struggle, a development that’s been all but removed here.
I’m not sure if I will care that much after seeing the movie a few more times, though, because the trade off is that we get much more Knives Chau. At the end of the Scott Pilgrim comic, Knives’ role is greatly diminished. She doesn’t really have anything to do with the finale of the story. In the movie, however, Wright makes the very smart and touching choice of making Knives a main player in the romantic drama up through the movie’s climax. Ellen Wong is fantastic, selling this as her character’s coming of age story at least as much as it is Scott’s. When all the cards are on the table, it’s genuinely a question whether Scott will end up with Knives, Ramona, or alone. Knives’ final line in the movie is devastating.
I’m beating around the bush here. What I’m trying to say is that hands down, Edgar Wright trumps Bryan Lee O’Malley’s ending. Edgar Wright has made Scott Pilgrim a Movie with a capital M, and the faster we can get past comparing it with its source material, the quicker we will all realize what a gift we have here. This is a better movie than we realize.
And last but not least, the standard warning: Scott Pilgrim’s is a world dense with obscure indie bands, gay roommates, vegans, video games, superpowers, slackers, self-centeredness, and irreverence. I don’t know if any generation before or after us will have any clue what this movie is about, but it without a doubt embodies the zeitgeist of our generation.
-Ben