Colossal (2016)

Director: Nacho Vigalondo

Kind of disappointing, actually.

I finally got around to watching this, after regretting not catching it in theaters several years back. I knew of the premise, which sounded fun and intriguing, and the movie got a fair amount of positive critical acclaim. And it's not that I found it bad. Rather, it just didn't come together enough to live up to what may have been overly high expectations.

The story is mostly that of Gloria (Anne Hathaway), a trainwreck of a party girl who has to retreat from New York City after yet another wild night out that leaves a trail of drunken bodies and self-involved hedonism leads her boyfriend to break up with her. She returns to the modest little town where she grew up and begins to reconnect with childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis). Things become wildly bizarre when Gloria and Oscar discover that their actions towards each other sync up with a pair of gigantic, Godzilla-like monsters which have been periodically materializing and destroying parts of downtown Seoul, South Korea.

You have to admit - that's a premise you probably haven't heard before. And for the first 30 or 45 minutes of the film, it shows some serious potential. Gloria and Oscar are clearly damaged people, with some sort of pain from their pasts that is connected to each other. They both drink heavily to keep away whatever is eating them up, and having such repression expressed in a movie through East Asian kaiju is a fun approach. But there were two problems with this movie that never resolved themselves:

I stuck with the Oscar and Gloria story to see if the resolution
explained the issues I had with the movie. It really didn't.
It was a shame, since I really like Sudeikis and Hathaway, and
they do fine acting work in this movie. 

One was that the characters, especially Oscar, didn't seem to be fully formed enough to explain their behavior. Erratic would be one thing, and it would make sense to an extent with these characters. But Oscar's actions often showed little to no rational from one moment to the next. Within the span of a few days, he goes from being a fairly likable, if boozy, old friend, to an absolutely self-obsessed and murderous maniac. The reasons the story offers for this dramatic transformation really don't add up enough to make it satisfying.

The other issue I had was how the movie unabashedly equates the inner turmoil of two pretty run-of-the-mill white Americans with the death and suffering of thousands of East Asian people. Perhaps this was part of the greater message of the movie - that privileged people can lose sight of how their petty concerns and personal issues can have massive impacts on other societies, but that message didn't seem to be set up or explored well at all, if such was even the case.