Colossal had me with the poster, because Anne Hathaway smiling at me is enough even before you add Korean monsters. Then I read the reviews, and nothing could stop me; Korean monster movie mashed up with rom-com. Even if you get something like that wrong, it’s going to be interesting.
Colossal is more than interesting; it’s a good movie which also has something to say about something ordinary and horrible. There aren’t really giant scary monsters which stomp around cities crushing buildings, but there are way too many people who stomp around their houses crushing the people who love them, whether it’s with words or fists. And I don’t fool myself for a moment; a silly movie about monsters isn’t going to put an end to domestic violence, or even put much of a dent in it. The kind of person who comes away from a movie shaking their heads and hoping they never do those things is not the kind of person who does those things. The most you can hope for is that the closing message might just get some of the decent people to take one more step when they see it happen.
Still. It’s a good movie. Anne Hathaway is probably not a great actress, but she’s got charisma to burn and the guts to play against that charisma. Gloria is a mess, and the script doesn’t bother making her misunderstood; everyone but Gloria’s got Gloria’s number. It takes her half the movie to realise how messed up she is, and the other half to realise how messed up her choices in other people have been. And five glorious minutes at the end to do something about it.
One of the cleverest things the script does is get the gag out of the way as quickly as possible. By the time we’re forty minutes in, Gloria has figured out that she’s the monster terrorising Seoul. This is two kinds of good. Firstly, the audience figured this out from the poster, and who wants to spend the whole movie watching the cast catch up with the audience. Secondly, and much more importantly, it gives us the rest of the movie to see what she’s going to do with that information, and that’s much more interesting than spinning out the surprise.
Men don’t come out of this well. The cast is tiny, and Anne Hathaway is the only woman. The men are variously idiots, bullies, idiots, or bullying idiots. It’s slightly ironic that one of the best dumb movies I’ve seen about a woman sorting herself out completely fails the Bechdel test. It’s disappointing that Dan Stevens is only there to play a slightly less awful boyfriend, since The Guest has left me with unrealistic expectations of Dan Stevens; on the other hand, it’s cool that Dan Stevens is willing to play a jerk in a good cause.
Above all, it’s a funny, curiously warm film about small town monsters and the possibility of getting beyond our bad impulses. Anne Hathaway makes it work well enough that I never once found myself wondering if anyone else would have been better. Since it’s not an ACTUAL Korean monster movie, I don’t imagine I need to worry about a remake with anyone else …
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