Initially, everything about Colossal seems inexplicably, gratuitously absurd. Dancing kaiju, for example. Or drunks controlling city-crushing monsters via psychic link. Or inexplicable portals between Seoul and a small American town. Or Anne Hathaway being involved with any of the above. Yet, after nearly two hours, the movie manages to sweep you up in its world, and it starts to make a weird kind of sense. And eventually, all the things that seemed unfathomable at first become exactly what makes its message so clear.
That’s not to say writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s (Timecrimes) latest film is perfect. But considering there's never been a kaiju movie that's an allegory for destructive relationships, it might be downright revolutionary. At a time when genre and sci-fi movies focus so much on one thing—namely, stuff going boom—*Colossal'*s true sucker punch is that it's a monster movie that's not really about monsters at all.
But Colossal doesn’t start out that way. It begins with Gloria (Hathaway) being dumped by her boyfriend, Tim (*Legion’*s Dan Stevens), because she parties all night and sleeps all day and shows no sign of changing. She proceeds to move back to her small hometown and reconnect with her childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who offers her a job at his bar—which allows her to, well, party all night and sleep all day. One day, Gloria awakes and realizes her drunken stumblings are being re-enacted by a giant creature terrorizing South Korea. (This is the most WTF aspect; just go with it.) She tells her fellow barflies and winds up hooking up with one of Oscar’s friends, which unleashes a monster of an entirely different kind: Oscar gets drunk, says inappropriate things, and ultimately uses this whole kaiju situation as a way of manipulating Gloria to get what he wants. The filmmakers have discussed Oscar's abrupt shift as an allegorical riff on Gamergate and the behaviors of the so-called alt-right; as Allison Willmore noted at BuzzFeed, Oscar presents “a particular type of toxic masculinity that has everything to do with wanting to loom large over another person, to keep them cowering in your shadow."
And that alone is something few—if any—sci-fi or genre movies have ever attempted to touch. (Unless there was a gendered power-struggle between Brie Larson and Tom Hiddleston in Kong: Skull Island I happened to miss.) Monster movies like Pacific Rim or Godzilla are good metaphors for humanity's instincts to trash the world, but they're never tools for showing us how we destroy each other. They never acknowledge that the anger necessary to cause massive damage can originate with one jilted person.
To reveal if or how Gloria gets out from under Oscar's thumb would be to say too much, and you have to see it to understand. Moreover, Colossal just needs to be seen. It's a small movie that, despite its star power, isn't getting a lot of attention. (It made a modest $125,809 in four theaters this weekend—an impressive $31,452 per-theater-average, but not a lot of cash.) That's likely because *Colossal'*s potential core audience probably doesn't know to look for it. Sci-fi and pulp fans who would enjoy its delightfully weird twist on the Scared City-Dwellers Run from Monster trope probably see the movie's quirky, rom-com-esque elements (and/or Hathaway-ness) and scurry in the other direction. Meanwhile, comedy lovers balk at the midnight-movie vibe. And when the center of your Venn diagram is simply People Who Like Weird Stuff, generating buzz gets much tougher. Without a Kong: Skull Island- or Beauty and the Beast-level marketing campaign, word of Colossal may never reach receptive ears.
That's a shame, but it's not a done deal. Although it's been an uneven year—or, really, years—for original science-fiction films like Life, and an unfortunate time for reboots like Ghost in the Shell, B movies like John Wick: Chapter 2 and Get Out have been getting more audience attentino and critical praise than in days past, so there's hope for Colossal yet. If folks can get passed the movie's general aura of Wait, wut? and pony up for a ticket, it could have a great run.
So the plea is this: Go see this movie. It’s hitting dozens of additional theaters this weekend, so you’ll have a lot more opportunities. Yes, it’s pretty weird, but you’ll get used to it. Do it because the world needs the weird genius of Nacho Vigalondo (also, he’s probably got a few lawyer fees to pay off after settling that lawsuit with Toho brought on by calling his movie "the cheapest Godzilla movie ever"). Do it because Hathaway is finally letting her freak flag fly, and it's high time more women carried genre movies. But mostly, do it because it's the good kind of oddball movie—and those kind of things deserve to crush a city near you.
