The '80s fashion victims had John Hughes. The early '90s grunge kids had Cameron Crowe. It's only fitting, then, that the iGeneration gets its own pop culture era-director in Edgar Wright, who's quite possibly earned the distinction with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, a film so meticulously and brilliantly tailor-made for the digital-kid comic/gamer junkies of today that it stands as a generational litmus test.
The film is, of course, based on the award-winning series of anime-styled graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, over which hundreds of thousands have pored and anticipated the big screen adaptation for years. At six volumes and nearly 1600 pages, it's a titanic expectation to place on a filmmaker to convey in full color and essence, and Wright goes to excruciating lengths to capture every detail of the look and feel of Scott Pilgrim's world. He largely succeeds, resulting in a gleaming reality hybrid of 8-bit video games, comic books and (fictional) real life, where power-ups and leveling up are as common as hairstyle insecurity (of which Scott has much), sound effects are shown as comic-style word bubbles and action scenes are straight out of gaming land — complete with multi-hit combos, level-ups and damage meters.
Michael Cera was reaching the end of his awkwardness rope before the Pilgrim, and audiences were tiring of his monotonous character portrayals. Thankfully, our concerns that he'd blend the beloved Scott Pilgrim character into the bland quirkiness of his previous roles are laid to rest with a performance that's earnest, well balanced and as true to book as one could possibly hope for. Cera nails it, and breaks out of his own mold in the process.
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Scott, by the way, is a lovable slacker with a string of failed relationships. He passes time on bass in a struggling garage band called Sex Bob-omb while he continues a passive flirtation relationship with an adorable 17-year-old superfan named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), but he's endlessly distracted, plagued by memories of a long-left ex and dreams of a mystery girl that blows his mind.
And then he meets her. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, cast perfectly), a delivery girl with ever-changing hair colors and the kind of gravity of confidence very few teenage girls genuinely exude. It's all too much for Scott, who falls fast and hard for the girl of his dreams. After floundering badly at the party where they met, he gets a second chance to ask her out when she delivers a package to his house. She accepts, but there's one little catch: he must defeat her Seven Evil Exes in a series of increasingly outlandish video game-style duels in order to win her heart. And so our story begins...
With the arrival of Matthew Patel (Satya Bhabha), Ramona’s First Evil Ex, the movie leaps from RomCom reality into the fictional world O’Malley created in his books, where defeated enemies burst into coins and fighting counter-strikes are championed as the Street Fighter series’ “Reversal” flashes on the bottom right of the screen. Played by Chris Evans, Brandon Routh and Jason Schwartzman, among others, the exes are supernaturally inclined freaks with increasingly powerful abilities and baggage to match.
While each ex's portrayal was crafted to the point of perfection, most of their backstories are told quickly to keep momentum strong. Jason Schwartzman shines with delicious villainy as Gideon Graves, the label-head shot-caller who Ramona has no control over herself around. It's an epic final battle that blends characteristics of several cornerstone games to deliver a grippingly suspenseful yet hilarious climax to the film. Bonus points to an unpredictable end scene in which we're truly torn on which girl - Ramona or Knives - Scott should end up with.
The fight scenes are spectacular, a beautiful blend of video game action and comic-panel presentation with reality roots only cropping up to give us narrative guideposts. The gamer hordes in the audience squealed with delight as they soaked in the experience of cinematic life bars and onscreen point totals embedded within the action sequences - including bonus points and power-ups for executing particularly difficult or skillful moves. The discovery of a one-up extra life at a crucial point in the film was the final straw for any holdouts at the premiere - the entire theater erupted in a triumphant roar when it came into play.
Peripherally, Kieran Culkin’s portrayal of Wallace Wells steals the undercard show, with a lowbrow-couth gravitas and some of the best dialogue in the film. Up In The Air's Anna Kendrick has a few amusing scenes as Scott's bemused but helpful sister, and while Scott's ex Envy Adams is reduced to a pan flash of one-note bitchiness with shades of untold backstory, Knives Chau makes the most of her character amendments as she transforms from clingy, pitiful hanger-on into an ass-kicking frontrunner for Scott's affections. By the end of the film, as the pair were teaming up to annihilate the film's Final Boss Gideon (Schwartzman), we were all starting to come around to the idea that maybe these two make a great team after all.
Someone who doesn't appear on screen deserves equal credit to cast and crew: weirdo-rock legend Beck Hansen, who provided the music for Scott’s band. The musical aspect is what holds the entire thing together, with Sex Bob-omb and Clash at Demonhead (Envy Adams' band - named after the first Nintendo game O’Malley received as a child) tearing off riffs and battle songs that zero in on the Guitar Hero franchise while transcending the clever quips will all-out rock awesome. The nuances in performance and supplemental animation to convey the power of the music are nothing short of brilliant.
Shifting and blending moods and atmospheres at such a rapid pace, so as to properly do justice to over 1600 pages of material, is no easy task to accomplish with grace and fluidity, but Wright has landed a hundred-jigawatt bullseye for the ADD gamer generation with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It's an overdose of fantastic iGen indulgence, a cinematic milestone that we'll watch with heavy, nostalgic sighs when we're old and can't relate to the strange whippersnappers of tomorrow. It'll be a strange, strange world a decade or two from now, when Scott Pilgrim is seen as a relic of our time - because for now, it's lightning in a bottle that eliminates the boundaries of what we thought filmmakers could accomplish onscreen.
CraveOnline Rating: 9.5 out of 10
Check out our interviews with Michael Cera (Scott Pilgrim) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Ramona) about the film!
