Director: Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hott Fuzz)
Screenplay: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
Graphic novel: Bryan Lee O’Malley
Producers: Nira Park, Marc Platt, Edgar Wright, Eric Gitter
Starring: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running time: 112 min

---

Synopsis:
Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), gamer, indie rocker and all around hipster-slacker meets Ramona Flowers, the girl of his dreams (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and must then fight her seven evil exes to win her favour. The prime conceit, in both graphic novel and movie, is that the fights occur in video-game style. In Canada, eh. In the meantime, Scott has dumped a few previous girlfriends in a fairly immature way, and the evil exes start to look a whole lot like a mirror image of his own selfishness and immaturity.

Read all of our reviews below…

Andrew:

(2/5)

Is it weird that I liked Speed Racer so much but didn’t care a whole lot for Scott Pilgrim? I appreciate the seemingly original concept but it’s not aimed in the right direction and feels far too obvious and broad to be of much interest. Having played several iterations of the “Final Fantasy” franchise as well as games of the “Mortal Combat” ilk, very little of the “jokes” were lost on me. However, aside from a few impressive instances, the film takes the most obvious pieces of cliche from these games to yawn inducing lows with simply too much repetition.

The movie’s strength is in its retro-gaming sensibilities for the 30-something crowd to appreciate, but the story and drama within is catering to the junior high crowd; ergo Scott Pilgrim as a whole doesn’t really make much sense for anyone.

What works: small moments of comedic details and obscurity. Kieran Culkin as the gay roommate steals every single scene in which he appears. Without him this movie almost fails completely in the comedy or screenplay department. Michael Cera does Michael Cera again and like Will Farrell, you either dig it or you don’t. Nuggets of genius that sprinkle themselves into some of the gags are what save the movie’s broader humor from being completely ho-hum.

As for the fight sequences, once again it’s simply the same thing over and over again. Even the choreography feels repetitive with the same sequence of fight moves used in every instance. With the exception of a fun girl vs. girl battle and a few details that you’ll miss if you blink, I found anything dealing in the actual plot of the film to be tedious and strung out far too long.

Essentially this is Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist mixed with a few moments of good comedy and a few instances of artistic details in between a bunch of fights that start and end the same way. I can actually get on board with all of the spastic editing and flashy visual styles (as I said, I liked Speed Racer), but the repetitiveness and lame screenplay ultimately did me in. Not a horrible experience, I had some laughs and enjoyed some details but the chances of me ever sitting down to watch this again are zero.

Jandy:

(4.5/5)

If pure enjoyment is a valid criterion for judgement, then Scott Pilgrim gets an A from me. It’s utterly ridiculous from start to finish, and I loved every second of it. I loved the 8-bit Universal logo, I loved the stat popups on all the characters, I loved the videogame sounds rendered graphically, I loved the gentle jabs at hipster culture, I loved the way it amped up a notch every time you thought it was already at eleven, I loved the way the narrative built on itself inevitably and yet cleverly (the double meaning of “getting a life” being only the most obvious), and I loved the pacing and the way locations changed two or three times in the midst of conversations, and all the other little (and big) stylistic touches that just made me happy.

Edgar Wright’s genius has never been creating something completely new out of nothing, but rather synthesizing things we already know into loving parodies that emulate the very thing they also make fun of. He partnered with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost to point out all the silly things we love about zombie movies and buddy cop movies while also creating a really solid zombie movie in Shaun of the Dead and a really solid buddy cop movie in Hot Fuzz (not to mention sending up basically everything in geek culture with Spaced), and now he’s done the same thing for video games and hipster culture in tandem with Scott Pilgrim author Bryan Lee O’Malley. People who say that Scott Pilgrim is a hipster movie are both wrong and right – it’s about hipsters and all the stupid, silly things that goes along with that, but it’s also slyly and delightfully critical of the hipster “cooler-than-thou” mentality.

It’s hard to get away from the fact that Michael Cera has been playing very similar roles for most of his career, and Scott Pilgrim is another hipster kid on the edge of being cool, but the way he inhabits this role makes all the other similar ones he’s played feel like practice for this one. Here he gets to up the quirk and the awkwardness while also playing a character that actually grows throughout the course of the film and has the opportunity to take hold of his own destiny in very explicit ways. The rest of the cast matches him, with Kieran Culkin scene-stealing as Scott’s gay roommate, Aubrey Plaza capitalizing on her cynical, sarcastic Parks & Recreation persona, Alison Pill making the most of her short screen time as Sex Bob-omb drummer and Scott Pilgrim dump-ee, Ellen Wong managing to play annoying!fangirlfriend, terrifying!stalker!exgirlfriend, and empowering!kickassfriend all perfectly, and of course Mary Elizabeth Winstead hitting the right notes as mysterious, unattainable, and ultimately messed-up Ramona Flowers. I did think Anna Kendrick was a little underused as Scott’s younger sister; Up in the Air proved she’s capable of much more than the repetitive role she’s given here. Aside from these roles, you’ve got to love a faux-superhero movie that casts Brandon Routh (aka Superman) and Chris Evans (aka Captain America) as villains, and Thomas Jane (aka The Punisher) as a cop in the Vegan Police. Which, don’t even get me started on how much I loved the existence of Vegan Police.

These sorts of in-jokes are one of the things I found really enjoyable about Scott Pilgim, but what makes it actually a good movie is that it doesn’t depend on them. As only a casual gamer during the time when this film is set, I probably got about 1/8 of all the retro gaming references, but I still loved the whole aesthetic. Seeing enemies burst into coins on impact, and having the film structured as a series of bigger and more elaborate boss battles in ever-grander and showier levels was great and brought a huge grin to my face. Though I’m sure it must’ve driven the “movies are too much like video games these days” naysayers into conniption fits. But being video-game-like is so clearly the point here that even though Scott Pilgrim is based on graphic novels, it’s very easy to want to say that it’s the best video game movie so far put on screen.

But Wright (and O’Malley) aren’t just taking on video games here – there’s so many other little moments and lines that encapsulate a specific subculture. The password is “whatever.” The battle of the bands between bands that aren’t particularly good, and yet, to be honest, I’ve been to an enormous number of local shows with bands just like this and enjoyed myself immensely. Hilariously brief songs that are shorter than their titles (those songs provided by Broken Social Scene, BTW). The afore-mentioned Vegan Police. Hipster zombie demon backup dancers. Like I said, this film is ridiculous. But it doesn’t try to be anything else than what it is, it goes all-out for whatever moment it’s trying to capture, it never pulls any punches, and it knows exactly what audience niche it’s going after. Apparently I’m that niche, and it nailed it for me. And if it leaves other audiences out in the process, Wright and Co. don’t seem to care. And I both respect that and reserve my right to enjoy the hell out of what they’ve given me. I saw it at a midnight screening opening day, and if they’d run it again immediately, I would’ve stayed. Perhaps that’s not a very critical viewpoint, but…….”whatever.”

Kurt: *Spoilers Below*

(4/5)

Its busy (BUSY!) visual style perhaps masks a clever bit of self-criticism of both a post-arcade gamer generation still young in its years, as well as the current culture of micro-trends and social media. Maybe that is a bit much to lay at the feet of an adaptation of a six volume indie comic, but there you have it. I would like to propose (apropos of this being the summer of Inception) that Ramona Flowers is not a real person, but a figment of Scott Pilgrim’s imagination to work out all of his personal hang-ups and anxieties for dating a girl (named Knives) both beneath his age (arrested development notwithstanding) and his ‘hipster indie cred’ status of bassist in garage-noise outfit Sex Bob-Omb. The fact that Scott is more or less guilty of many of the ‘attributes’ of the ‘Evil-Exes’ on top of Ramona’s casual indifference and confusion seems to give rise to his personal world of semi-confident self-loathing. Hey, Scott is pretty much happy to hang out with ‘Mega-Scott’ at the end, leaving Knives at ‘lets be friends’ and still pining for the both obtained and unobtainable Ramona. It Is all me, myself and my video game mirror-world as the credits roll, a least that is how I see it.

Details such as Ramona’s ever-changing hair-style gives Scott Pilgrim vs. The World a casual resemblance to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (and Michel Gondry also favours a cute and genre-defying aesthetic), Scott Pilgrim plays like the kindergarten version, and yet that is still is pretty darn good.

Presented in eyeball melting grunge-gloss-glory is a world where thoughts and motion cues are visualized on screen, where ‘enemies’ explode into coins and the soundtrack is a mixture of indie rock and retro-Nintendo synth are all in service of Scott Pilgrim’s inner psyche – Bryan Lee O’Malley and Edgar Wright’s pop cultural savvy and channeling their own inner Tyler Durdens. Those who complain about the over-exposure, and general similarity of Michael Cera’s current run of performances would be wise to check out Youth In Revolt which offers a more ‘split’ Cera: The nice-enough nerdy good guy and the passive-aggressive troublemaker. Here those halves have been combined to the point where the ‘narcissistic asshole’ has proved the dominant (yes, echoes of this were in the satirical and lauded sitcom from which a heavier and younger model Michael Cera was initially noticed). Is this a make it or break it aspect of the film? One of many. I like that a modest budget, but nevertheless studio approved, multiplex film has the resolve to keep its hero a jerk. Maybe he learns a little, but fundamentally, he has a long way to go before adulthood. Don’t we all?

Matt Brown:

(0.5/5)

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is one of the most completely disappointing movies I have ever seen. It is a failure on nearly every level of construction, from casting to script, from style to the basics of “getting” of “it.” Scott Pilgrim makes Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which was no great shakes as a movie, look like great shakes as a movie. Why? Because that film, for any of its flaws, evinced a working understanding of the emotional lives of its characters, and this film does not. And if you hand me any intimation of that isn’t the point, I will tell you that you do not understand the point.

If this is considered a faithful adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim books, then we had vastly different experiences of reading those books. It’s an easy mistake to make – bad guys explode into coins when killed, etc. – but when they weren’t about flaming swords and giant robots, the books were actually about real life. They contained recognizable emotional dilemmas and relate-able human beats, even in the midst of (and sometimes, because of) the video-arcade glamour that Bryan Lee O’Malley shipped wholesale into his hipster tale of twentysomething coming of age in Toronto, Ontario.

Edgar Wright’s film, on the other hand, just thinks the books were really, really cool.

There isn’t a single effort made whatsoever to give a sense of emotional reality to this movie. It is virtually mathematical in its laborious meting out of Plot Points A Through Z of Graphic Novels 1 Through 6 over the course of Minutes One through One Hundred and Twenty of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Fifteen minutes: Introduce Scott Pilgrim, his Stupid Little Life, and Ramona V. Flowers. Ten minutes: Evil Ex Fight 1. Ten minutes: Evil Ex Fight 2. Ten minutes: Evil Ex Fight 3. By around this point, I was honestly contemplating leaving the movie, not because it was the worst film I’d ever seen or even because it was so fundamentally at odds with my fondness for its source material, but because it was so profoundly, bewilderingly inert.

Oh sure – these are some great fights. The only time Pilgrim flies is when those nasty Evil Exes show up to do video-game battle with Scott. The sequences are overproduced and virtually come with storyboard lines hastily smudged out, but they are fucking alive, man. It’s the rest of the movie that seems like a desperate attempt to tell a half-remembered joke. Particular failures are, of course, Cera as Scott, who is for the bajillionth time playing Michael Cera As Himself, and needs to be fired, fired, fired forever; and Winstead as Ramona, who has gone ahead and made the somewhat frosty, somewhat delicious blue-haired pinup from O’Malley’s novels into a woman so terrifically unlikeable that by about the time Lucas Lee is dusting off the power of veganism, you will legitimately be wondering why Scott is fighting for her at all.

Ellen Wong as Knives Chau (17 years old) gets off to a rocky start, but is so adroit at the wilting hysteria of the post-breakup incarnation of the character – not to mention the kung-fu – that she damn near walks off with the whole movie. This is not necessarily a difficult theft, as the rest of the merry band is resolutely hit-and-miss. Kieran Culkin gets all the best lines, and flubs less than half of them, but Alison Pill has no idea what Kim Pine was like, so opts for stone-faced bitch. Jason Schwartzman isn’t bad as Gideon, while Mark Webber, who plays Stephen Stills, is as charismatic as an oyster I ate one time.

Not to pull the local-boy union card, but I wonder if a Toronto comic, the basis for a Toronto movie, should have been handed over to someone who’d never been here and will never come back. For all its universality, there was a relate-able “our stuff” vibe to Scott Pilgrim that gave it the home field advantage in these parts. Scott Pilgrim, the movie, is utterly without vibe. It’s a frenzied creation of a string of scenes that has long since forgotten it was supposed to have an emotional throughline, like a garage band trying so hard to sound like a real band that they’ve failed to sound like something you’d want to listen to.

What a colossal clusterfuck. A movie like this makes me want to stop writing about movies, seeing movies, thinking about movies. I do truly abhor having to shit on everyone’s good time, but come on, man. Shame on this.

Marina:

(3/5)

The excitement level as the 8-bit Universal logo popped onscreen was palpable. People were laughing, pointing and as Scott Pilgrim vs. The World kicked off, I couldn’t help but be swept up in the epic epicness. Zelda theme music, a crew of 20-somethings that could have walked out of any university campus and way more Canadiana than any non-Canadian has any right to know about. Scott Pilgrim is a whole lot of fun. Yet, as it chugs along, the film loses steam.

Part of it is the continued droning of arcade tunes, another is Michael Cera’s bland performance. Essentially, it’s a case of too much goodness for its own good and though most of these tidbits are cool in small doses they get boring quickly and partway through you can’t help but want a little heart and sadly, that’s something the movie lacks; at least from its central performance. There are some good performances here but mostly from the supporting cast namely Alison Pill as Kim (she oozes more awesome with a 10 second camera swipe than Cera can muster in the entire film), Kieran Culkin as the gay roommate (this kid should definitely be working more – he’s emerged as a great talent), Anna Kendrick as Scott’s little sister and Chris Evans who seemed to be having way too much fun as evil ex Lucas Lee (hello Don McKellar!).

Entertaining? Yes. Draining? A little. With a tad more emotion, Scott Pilgrim could have been a film for a generation yet as it stands, it’s simply an emotionally vacant, hyper-stylized bit of coolness. Good entertainment the first time around and perhaps even the second (for those bits of nostalgia and Canadiana I missed the first time around) but lacking any real KAPOW!

 
 

Bob:

(4/5)

I can completely understand how someone may not enjoy, and even completely dislike, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. It flashes by the eyes, sometimes pulling them in four or five directions at once, overloads the auditory senses and in its quieter moments has characters that aren’t really that interesting or sympathetic. It’s a video game inside a comic book inside a movie. Subtlety is not its aim.

So I understand that. However, I had great heaps of candy-coated fun with this movie. I laughed out loud numerous times, found that the pacing between scenes pulled me along effortlessly (though it felt a bit long towards the end) and came away completely satisfied. To be clear up front, I have no knowledge of the graphic novel on which the film is based. I’ve never even seen a hardcopy issue. Nor am I biased due to living in the city of Toronto where the film was shot and where it is set. Sure it was occasionally great to recognize many of the locations, but it never took precedence over the story or action. Admittedly, having at least a passing knowledge of video games helps a great deal in enjoying the battles between Scott and the “Seven Evil Exes”, but there’s no requirement to be a full on “geek” that some of the hype for the film has indicated. My recent knowledge of video games comes strictly through my 10-year old and it gave me ample background to get immersed in the hybrid world of Scott Pilgrim and all of his duels to the death.

When we meet Pilgrim at the beginning of the film, he’s a 22-year old out of work schlub who plays bass in a band and can’t get over a devastating break-up. He doesn’t seem to think of anyone but himself, isn’t very interesting and is dating a 17-year old high school girl simply because it’s easy. So how does a guy like this get involved in head-to-head battles against villains with super human type powers? And why should the audience care? The first question is much easier to answer…Scott meets the fabulous Romona (played with extreme cool by Mary Elizabeth Winstead), acts like a total dweeb in front of her and hounds her for a date. When she accepts, mostly to shut him up, the die has been cast – Pilgrim soon finds out that he must do battle with every one of her previous romantic liaisons going all the way back to middle school. It’s not a simple matter of simply throwing some punches or outwitting each one of them since his opponents have force fields, can hover in the air, read his thoughts, etc. Pilgrim finds that he too can do many of the acrobatic moves that comprise these boss-type battles, but always needs to rely on some additional smarts and information about his foes to defeat them (at which point they explode into a pile of coins). If the battles sound like they might get repetitive, each one brings in some new aspect that allows additional video game references and tactics to be used. As each battle started, I found myself settling a bit more in my seat and widening my grin. With points tallying up on the screen, 1-Ups occurring and new powers being won, it does feel a bit like you’re watching your friend have a really long turn on the Nintendo Wii, but in the context of the film and the way that director Edgar Wright puts it all up on the screen it feels like a game that you just can’t wait to take a crack at.

Given Pilgrim’s unlikeable personality, though, that second question looms large – should we root for him? Early on, I was wondering the same thing, but Wright and his co-screenwriter Michael Bacall (who base their story on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel) manage to keep you on Pilgrim’s side using several different methods. One is by placing Pilgrim in this colourful comic book world that allows for additional information to come through in titles, helpful labels, frames within frames and other little pop-ups throughout. There’s also the humour which zips in and out via visual cues, quick edits and character based moments (which all echo Wright’s previous films). And finally there’s Michael Cera’s performance. If you’re tired of Cera by now, this won’t help change your mind, but if you can appreciate his skill at timing his verbal and facial reactions, you’ll likely be able to give his character all sorts of leeway. Given how the story plays out and Romona’s own reasons for going out with Pilgrim in the first place, I ended up being perfectly fine with the decision not to make him a typical sympathetic protagonist (I’m not sure how the original source depicts him). It’s a tricky line to walk though.

The rest of the cast are marvelous as well: Kieran Culkin is a latter day Robert Downey Jr. (circa Back To School), but even better; Alison Pill plays the band’s perpetually pissed off drummer; Ellen Wong channels a 17 year-old in serious crush mode; and so on and so on. Winstead is terrific as Romona, the slightly mysterious, gorgeous and obviously smarter than everyone else American girl trying to get away from her past. A raised eyebrow or small curl of her lip is about as much emotion as she shows for most of the film, but it’s effective and makes you keenly aware why Scott has suddenly fallen for her (I’ll admit it, so did I). The music is an additional driving factor for the movie. You don’t really have to even watch the credits to know that Beck and Frank Black had ample influence on the music written for the film. It simply moves, moves, moves the action forward.

So if you were ever curious what a video game inside a comic book inside a movie feels like and you want to have a hugely entertaining time at the movies, Edgar Wright has the perfect Combo for you.

 
 

---

Consensus (Hint: There ain’t One!):
A wildly divisive film amoungst the Row Three regulars, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the epitome of a ‘decide for yourselves’ sort of film. Some like the visual style and Toronto colour, others find it as a cheap veneer to a story about very little with unlikable ciphers. Others find it a stylish take on youth and narcissism that does not pull punches as to what it is, or even offer any warnings that this is a bad thing. It it is niche movie? A hipster curio? A cult movie? Time will tell.

(3/5)

Relevant Links:
IMDb profile
Official Site
Twitter
Facebook