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Canberra Today 15°/17° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Colossal’ (M) ** and a half

MUCH of the plot of Spanish film-maker Nacho Vigalondo‘s sci-fi-comedy-actioner-monster-fantasy movie set in Mainview, middle-America, unfolds in the tavern where Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) gives Gloria (Anne Hathaway) a job behind the bar. 

She’s a comely creature, which rather confirms the adage about not judging a book by its cover. Coming home after an unfulfilled life in New York, she has moved into her late parents’ unfurnished house.

Oscar believes that everybody’s problems can be solved by having another drink. It works for him, doesn’t it? Hangovers find Gloria a soft target. 

When Oscar delivers a TV to her house, leading the news, and thereafter never off it, the South Korean capital finds itself under invasion by a gigantic being, very likely animal. The world’s media don’t have a name for it. 

Like Gloria, it flounders around causing local destruction but not showing animosity. Gloria detects that it mimics her physical movements. Meanwhile, her rejection of Oscar’s coming on to her makes him more than a little scratchy. And half a world away, the being disturbing Seoul finds itself accompanied by a robot.  Guess who in Mainview the robot mimics. And how the two beings get on with each other.

“Colossal” tells its story inexorably but less-than-well crafted. As its initial comic flavour gives way to attempts to explain its more grave matters, you can’t but wonder why any of its four corporate producers agreed to put up the funding. Then you realise that it’s low-budget film-making, no great disaster if the product turns out well. Anne Hathaway does bright, unorthodox, comedy rather well. 

Vox pop time. For the first 30 or so minutes of “Colossal”, a bloke looking a bit like someone on day release from a psych ward giggled constantly, even when nobody else laughed. Fair enough. But annoying for the rest of us especially when the comedy gave way to more serious matters but the giggles didn’t.

Somewhere in that there’s a message about appropriate behaviour in a cinema. The film, on the other hand, brings no intrinsic message.

At Dendy

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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