Movie Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

LITTLE ROCK — Maybe I’ve got this wrong, but it seems to me that a video game is to be played, not watched.

I understand why it might work to use a movie as a starting point for a video game; it might become something that a fan could take home as a souvenir, a way of re-entering the dream and taking possession of it. You might install yourself as the hero, or the villain, or even as a secondary character and play your way through a familiar universe as a lazy alternative to imaginative industry.

On the other hand - and I’m well aware this may be generational - I simply don’t understandthe appeal of a movie based on a video game. I mean, you don’t get to play a movie. However deeply you invest in and empathize with acharacter, you can’t affect the character’s trajectory. Even in the loosest-feeling productions, a script has fixed the outcome. The actors are not playing out their parts in real time before your eyes. There are limits to the illusion.

Now, I recognize that Scott Pilgrim is not quite based on a video game but on a Torontobased comic book series - or graphic novel if you’d rather - which incorporates the tropes of video games.

But Scott Pilgrim doesn’t work for anyone who isn’t squarely in its narrowed demographic sights. At times it seems like everyone involved in its making is too cool to care about traditional values of story and character or even adhering to a consistent internal logic, and that the only real purpose the film could serve is as a kind of cultural litmus test - to winnow out those who don’t get it.

Anyway, to the extent the movie is about anything, it’s about the title character, an unemployed 22-year-old Canadian who plays bass in a noisy three-piece band called The Sex Bob-omb. Though it doesn’t really come throughin Michael Cera’s typically feckless performance, Scott Pilgrim is a narcissistic, lazy and aggressively nonconfrontational jerk. He’s play-dating a high school girl named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). Scott, who lives with his gay roommate (Kieran Culkin), is smitten by dream invader Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). She soon enough shows up in Scott’s real life and agrees to date him, provided he defeats her seven deadly exes.

Loud and filled with overthe-top visual flourishes meant to replicate the graphic experience of comics, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World feels like a failure, an experiment in noise and light by the usually reliable Edgar Wright that simply doesn’t work. Whileoccasionally entertaining, it’s neither funny nor genuinely exciting - at times it plays like a junior varsity Kill Bill, and its studied weirdness is likely to exhaust those who aren’t already vested fans.

Some people will like the movie because it embodies acultural moment in which they feel some ownership. Some will identify with the young losers who populate the movie and make this sort of a 21stcentury St. Elmo’s Fire (another terrible, though beloved movie for a self-absorbed generation cut off from the traditions of Western culture).

In short, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World may be the worst movie Wright ever makes; it may be the worst movie to leave a significant footprint this year. But some people will love it. And that’s OK.

But you kids - you’d better stay off my lawn.