I remember when this film came out in the cinema all my
friends that went to go see it kept telling me how amazing it was how original
and unique the story was and how I never got to see it in the cinema. So
instead I read the comic and fell in love with the beautiful black and white
images that Bryan Lee O’Malley had drew and the strange love story presented on
the pages. The problem was now I was very emotionally attached to the story and
had such high expectations for the film (after all the hype my friends had
given it) I was worried how it would turn out, by this stage I had decided to
wait for the film to be released on DVD. So were my worries justified? No.
Putting it simply this is one of (if not my) favourite films ever.
So what’s it all about then? Well if you haven’t seen Scott
Pilgrim, I suggest you do go see it, but if you’d rather not then I’ll try and
not give away to many spoilers. Scott (Michael Cera) is in his early 20’s, he’s
a musician and he’s started dating a high schooler (Ellen Wong as Knives Chau),
he’s never worked a day in his life and he’s very happy go lucky. His friends
don’t approve of him dating her. He then meets another girl Ramona Flowers (Mary
Elizabeth Winstead) who is quiet literally the girl of his dreams and becomes obsessed
with her ignoring Knives completely. He starts dating Ramona and knows he has
to breakup with Knives but keeps putting it off, there’s also one tiny little
catch with dating Ramona. Scott has to defeat her seven evil exes. As you can
imagine things don’t play out smoothly for poor Scott and around evil ex 4 he
begins to wonder if Ramona is worth it, and Knives now realising Scott had been
seeing her as well as Ramona does what everyone in the same situation would do
she blames everything on Ramona.
Scott then starts to realise how much Ramona means to him
but he might of drove Ramona back into the arms of her seventh evil ex, Gideon
Gordon Graves/G-man (Jason Schwartzman) who’s the one responsible for putting
together the seven evil exes, he’s also literally inside her head by a conveniently placed control chip. So Scott
goes to win Ramona back and challenges Gideon to a final fight with the power
of love and is killed, however following the films gamer logic Scott uses his
1up he got earlier to give the fight another go and this time with the power of
self respect he along with help from Knives and Ramona defeats Gideon and walks
off into the distance with Ramona.
Ok so as I mentioned I love this film and comic, I loved the
use of gamer, music and general nerdy references and here the film is not only extremely
faithful to the comic but takes things one step beyond for example each ex is
given a symbol representing their number. I also love the actors, I’d love to
be able to pick out a stand out but everyone is so true to their character and represents
them so well, the one I’d pick if I had to though would be Kieran Culkin as
Wallace Wells, Scott’s roommate and all around scene stealer when he’s on
screen and takes some liberties with the character that make him probably my
favourite. However there are some things I take issue with the main one being
the shortening of the story, in the comics Ramona and Scott’s relationship takes
place over the course of a year so it makes sense that the two fall in love
with each other and it also makes the ending more believable, where as in the
film it takes place over the course of about a week so the ending doesn’t feel
deserved, the film makes even thought as much putting in an alternate ending
where Scott ends up with Knives, that fits with the film. I also missed certain
characters/scenes from the comic but I can see why they were cut.
I realised I never gave a rating before to any of the films
I’ve reviewed, that’s because I think you should be able to tell from how I talk
about a film how I feel about it, but I think I’ll start giving ratings on a 10
scale. So Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is a 10/10 for me. I highly recommended
you check out this film and hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I have.
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