Colossal falls in with the sorts of postmodern-ish alternative monster movies that seem tailor-made to make the rounds on cult movie websites that have particular love for high concept genre takes, a category that includes the likes of Big Man Japan, Rubber, and Bad Milo! Writer-director Nacho Vigalondo’s 2007 time travel thriller Timecrimes was another favourite in those same circles, and so his particular high concept take on the giant monster genre had some clout going in. Even so, for a project like this, there’s always a risk that the people making an “unusual” take on the genre have no real understanding or connection with that particular genre and produce something that is actually less “unusual” or interesting than they think, or that the big concept and meta jokiness takes the place of actual substance or entertainment value (I’m looking at you, Rubber.) While Colossal‘s use of giant monsters sticks to the standard ideas and imagery (Vigalondo apparently pitched it at film festivals by mentioning Godzilla and even using images of Godzilla, which earned him a ticket to lawsuit city), its purpose is to act as a fantastical shadow of the human narrative, reflecting it as well as looming over it.
The basic pitch is Magical Realist in nature: Gloria (Anne Hathaway) is a jobless alcoholic who has finally been kicked out of the New York loft of her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens, a star on that Downtown Abbey show) until she can get her life back together. In order to do this, she moves back into her childhood home in a small New Hampshire town, and eventually discovers that when she steps onto a certain playground at a certain time in the morning, a giant monster manifests in the city of Seoul and mimics her exact movements. The process of figuring this out is gradual: she sees news reports of the monster’s first appearance and treats it like the most surprising and terrifying thing she’s ever seen…how a normal person would probably react to a large city actually being attacked by a giant monster. After an additional day or two of drunkenly finding herself in the park and obsessively watching more reports of the monster, she begins to make the connection, although she has no explanation for it, and she tests it by performing specific movements and watching footage of the monster do the same.
Gloria’s knowledge that she is the monster makes her complicated life situation even more complicated—she is initially horrified by it, realizing that one of her drunken walks home accidentally killed a hundred or more people in Seoul, and the guilt colours many of her decisions afterwards; however, after getting a job at a bar working for her childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis, that soccer coach guy that people seem to like now), she gets drunk again and decides to share her “secret” by demonstrating the connection in front of Oscar and two of his buddies (Austin Stowell and Tim Blake Nelson.) Needlessly to say, she’s kind of a wreck, and the most obvious reading is that the monster business is a large-scale projection of the way her problems affect other people. That was probably the original pitch, with Hathaway’s celebrity glamour acting as a contrast to the messy, substance-abusing adult child that has become pretty standard issue in Hollywood films, although she is certainly playing someone who is believable as that sort of person and in the way she reacts to the increasingly unbelievable nature of the plot.
After revealing her newly-discovered power/curse to the rest, the realization that her actions have a literal weight to them more or less forces her to clean up her act, to prevent another deadly drunken rampage—so, despite working at a bar, she stops drinking. While she would probably prefer to never go to the playground again, she decides that she wants to do something to apologize for her actions, so Oscar gets a local Korean-speaker to write a note that Gloria copies in the sand, a message leaving the people of Seoul and the international news crews baffled but also hopeful.
This bizarre lesson in responsibility and empathy has apparently helped begin to get her life together, but there’s a lot more movie left, so you know the story is going to get even more complicated. The biggest complication: when Oscar joins her on the playground, a giant robot manifests in Seoul mimicking his movements, leaving that city now reeling from the appearance of two giants. Both of them realize that they suddenly have a power that they didn’t know about, and the way they treat this power becomes the real spine of the movie.
The situation changes as it becomes more “normalized”, for Gloria and Oscar and for the rest of the world as well: when the monster and the robot no longer look like they pose a threat, they instead become figures of fun and the subject of Internet memes. This movie really isn’t much of a comedy, but it does wring as much as it can out of the visual gag of a giant monster doing dances and acting out mundane body language, almost like an elaborate goof on the concept of mocap, as the monster and the robot look and act like random CGI puppets. Surprisingly, Vigalondo and the effects artists actively chose not to use mocap for the monsters, instead copying Hathaway and Sudeikis’ movements “by hand”, as it were.
Rather than just having the monsters—which skirt the line of looking like bootlegs, but are not notably derivative of any real giant movie monsters—make a character arc exceedingly literal, its effect on the world, and especially on Seoul and its citizens, is integral. It becomes not just about Gloria’s problems, or even about realizing the effect her problems have on other people, but also how detached people in the western world can be from the things that happen elsewhere. We get to see the reaction among people in Gloria’s hometown to what must be one of the most unbelievable events in human history, people unable to take their eyes off the news, and the way it casually makes it way into random conversations; we also see the signs of genuine grief and calls for humanitarian aid in response to the first round of death and destruction. At the same time, these things all go on while people live out their lives, with Gloria specifically having to deal with her life situation at the same time the monster business is going down (although the two obviously become intertwined)—even one of the most unbelievable events in human history doesn’t make mundane life come to a halt. All of this is especially emphasized when the events are happening on another continent, and our main cast consists entirely of white Americans, who knowingly or not, have a tendency to put less value on people who are not also white Americans.
Importantly, we see that Oscar’s reaction to the first reports of the monster and then Gloria’s connections to it (and her anguish about the deaths she caused) is curiously blase—and that side of his personality comes out more and more as the plot progresses. He starts off very nice and supportive of Gloria, seemingly happy that she has come back, but as she actually starts to get her life back on track, an existing bitterness within him begins to surface. Resentful of the fact that she got out of their hometown while he was stuck managing a sparsely-attended bar, and even more resentful of all the ways she has outshone him going back to their school days, Oscar eventually shows himself to be one of those bad “friends” who seems to be on your side at first, but silently despises your successes and wants to drag everyone around them down to their level. This is something that is eventually revealed to be tied directly to the magical explanation for their monstrous projection powers, which maybe makes some of the themes and images in the movie a bit too obvious and overworked, although the revelation that the two giant monsters are actually based on toys gives their aesthetics a certain fun fantasy logic.
The growing rift between Gloria and Oscar, acted out by the monster and the robot, confuses the world even more, but does allow the movie to get into giant monster fighting territory with an emotional edge. Eventually, when it becomes clear that Gloria might be able to return to her highfalutin New York City life (although I don’t really know why she would go back to her boyfriend, who also seems like kind of a jerk), Oscar’s bitterness boils over into outright psychopathy, as he threatens to intentionally stomp around the playground every morning and endlessly bang up Seoul and its population if she actually leaves—the point where his indifference to the lives of other people turns into outright malice, using his power to callously toy with real lives just to torment someone else, or to somehow make his own life feel like it actually means anything. Oscar’s pettiness in the final sections of the movie have a sad and identifiable reality to them, and the added fantasy elements seem mostly to reinforce that reality rather than heighten them to movie villain levels. The same goes for Gloria’s response: saddled with even more guilt and responsibility while on the cusp of vanquishing her own demons, her actions in the climax are a clever use of the movie’s logic.
There’s a level of punitive genre story violence to the ending, and competing senses of relief and tragedy, which reflect the messy conflict throughout Colossal. The movie’s attention-grabbing pitch is to have small problems transmogrified into significantly larger ones, and the parallel scales of the two interact in more thoughtful ways than if they were just played for comedy or sentimental pathos. Actions end up having far more meaning than the characters necessarily want, and trying to balance doing things for themselves with actual life-and-death moral decisions, which only they know about, magnifies the more standard complications of adult life. This is a movie that recognizes the giant monster movie’s capacity for loud symbolic allegory, but it’s the micro level stuff that ends up feeling the most cataclysmic.
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