Featured Creature The Kaiju File 2: The one where a drunk lady stomps Korea

 

 

Title: Colossal

What Year?: 2016

Classification: Mashup/ Improbable Experiment

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

In considering the current lineup (see Godzilla Vs Biollante), something I debated very seriously was whether to cover kaiju movies from the US. To my thinking, the “true” kaiju movies are those from Japan, outside of a few very early examples that influenced Godzilla. With that criterion, I could have gone with something from the 1950s-‘60s golden age, but the point of this feature has been to document the quality monster movies of the “modern” era, and I felt this to be especially important with the kaiju film. To really cover the shape of the genre, then, I needed an American entry. That left several obvious possibilities, both good and (very) bad. On consideration, the one that rose to the top was recently enough that I would normally disregard it. It also happens to be one of strangest entries to fall at all within the genre, even compared to the likes of Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster. I present Colossal, the only movie about kaiju and alcoholism.

Our story begins with an introduction to Gloria, who breaks up with her big-city boyfriend after another night out that she doesn’t quite remember. She returns to her hometown, where she soon reconnects with her childhood friend Oscar, who has to remind her who died before and after her departure. It doesn’t help matters when she goes to work at Oscar’s bar. After another night blackout drunk, she learns that a giant monster has attacked a southeast Asian city, then literally disappeared into thin air. When another blackout corresponds with a second attack, Gloria realizes that the monster is materializing whenever she goes to a park in the town. She quickly tries to stop and make amends. But it turns out Oscar has the same power she does, and he’s willing to stomp Seoul to get what he wants!

Colossal was a 2016 film written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo. The production involved studios and entities from the US, Canada, Spain and South Korea. The film starred Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis as Gloria and Oscar, with English actor Dan Stevens as Gloria’s ex Tim. Filming took place in Vancouver, Canada in late 2015, while Hathaway was expecting her first child. A lawsuit was filed by Toho during preproduction, alleging that Vigalondo had used images of Godzilla while promoting the film to its financial backers; this reportedly led to Seoul, South Korea being used as a setting instead of Tokyo. It remains unclear if a Godzilla-like design was ever planned for the film, as the monster and robot designs actually used clearly had more in common with those of Pacific Rim. The film received limited release in 2016 and 2017. Though it received positive reviews, it was not a financial success, earning $4.5 million against a $15M budget.

For my experiences, I suppose the thing to talk about here is what the Hell I watch when I actually go to a theater. I’m sure that those with only this blog as a frame of reference would expect me to be well-versed in the offbeat end of contemporary cinema. The reality is that, outside of a predilection for sci fi/ fantasy/ horror genre films and animation, what I get to in theatrical release is pretty close to “mainstream”, in no small part because of my issues with mobility. Sure, I’ve caught more than a few movies that are obscure or notorious now (see Meteor Man). The ones that are truly off the grid, however, usually don’t even show up at the places I can get to on my own initiative. The present film is a quite rare example of a movie I saw in first run that was under the radar even at the time, which I probably wouldn’t have gotten to if it hadn’t turned up at semi-independent theater close to where I worked at the time. It made a favorable enough impression that I bought it when it came out on disc, though I only watched it once or twice before the viewing for this review. It has remained easily the most unusual of modern, Western kaiju movies, yet one that is intriguing more than good.

Moving in, the obvious issue to deal with is that the kaiju element is limited in scope. For the most part, this is one thing that works. There’s really only one sequence where we see Gloria and the monster in action, explicitly to demonstrate her power without hurting anyone. The resulting scene offers some effective dark humor, plus the intriguing twist that she feels and instinctively responds to attacks against the monster. Whether enough firepower could injure the monster or her is one of a number of points that aren’t resolved, but not really important to the to the story. Any deficit of monster action is more than made up for by the film’s take on the post-9/11 news cycle, as the media respond to an inexplicable and apocalyptic event with the same trivializing overanalysis as any tragedy of the day. The one lingering problem is that the monster itself is unsatisfying in ways that are difficult to account for. The design is quite unusual, even compared to the already gnarly Pacific Rim kaiju, and the CGI certainly isn’t “that” bad. I think it’s pertinent on this front that there’s never a mention of the kaiju genre within the film, despite the explicit links made to anime-based 1980’s toys. Without that “meta” frame of reference, and perhaps a little more of the vivid colors of the source material, the monster just feels vaguely overfamiliar.

The “other side” to this equation is the human story, and this is where the film is unquestionably a mixed bag. Though the story throws out plenty of side characters, nobody except perhaps Tim gets enough development to sidetrack from Gloria and Oscar, and there are very good reasons to take the focus off the central pair at least for a stretch. Considered together or separately, these are flawed, unlikable and very unhappy people, which is clearly the point up to a point. The very high caliber of the leads does a lot of further good in keeping the film watchable. The problem is that the movie doesn’t know what to do with them any better than they do with themselves. The idea that they would, should or even want to be romantically involved is mercifully set aside. Without it, however, we have no frame of reference for Oscar’s fixation on Gloria, nor any further connection with her own self-destructive cycle. I can’t help thinking that this could have worked at least a little better framed from Oscar’s perspective, with him piecing together what Gloria can’t. On a certain level, however, Oscar’s motivations are simply a red herring that the film itself never quite lets go of. The mature lesson here is that it’s pointless to try to explain madness, let alone ask the afflicted to explain themselves, and a story with that moral shouldn’t need almost two hours of wonky pacing to be told.

That leaves the one scene, and I’m going, as I do more often than might be expected, with one I kind of forgot. As the finale approaches, Gloria comes to the bar with Tim. They sit down, and Gloria rises to tend to a customer, only to be told to sit down again. Then, with absolutely no lead-in, Oscar says, “What would you say would be the most irresponsible thing you could do in this bar?” Right then, I myself remembered very quickly what’s coming. After a very funny monologue, Oscar breaks out by his own description “the most illegal thing in this bar”, a firework literally the size of a beer keg. He tells the tale of its purchase, for boyish mischief long since outgrown, and there’s never any doubt what he’s going to do. The strangest yet most telling thing, in an overarching theme of the film, is that nobody tries to stop him when he lights the fuse…

In closing, what I find myself coming back to is the place of the kaiju genre in the US and the West in general. I’ve commented occasionally on Japanese “knockoffs” that really feel more like a nation and culture taking back what was theirs, like Message From Space and Lily CAT. In a very real sense, the kaiju movie is a case of the reverse. The foundations of the genre were laid by American films like King Kong (why not see my review of the first remake?) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, yet once Japan found it, they made it so completely their own that even the films they ripped off no longer feel in the same category. The unfortunate collateral damage is that the Western mainstream never again accepted the genre on its own terms. At best, we could not understand it, as seen with certain ill-advised “remakes”. At worst, we minimized and ridiculed it with jokes and parody. In the present film, we finally got a middle ground, a movie that recognized the dark metaphors and reapplied them to ourselves. The result may have been all kinds of not great, and it may have faired even worse in the general pop culture, but it earns its place here as an American film that finally, indisputably did something new with the kaiju concept. That is enough to win my respect.