Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: An (almost) Epic Journey

Without getting too much into the plot of the story (if you saw the trailers, you pretty much know the plot anyway) I wanted to watch the movie for two reasons: lead actor Michael Cera and director Edgar Wright.

With Cera, my concern was his ability to come off as tough as Scott Pilgrim does in the comic. See, Cera comes from the Jesse Eisenberg/Tobey Maguire/Elijah Wood brand of soft-spoken, faintly neurotic-yet-charming class of male actors that women (for some reason) find so appealing. Somehow, Cera manages to pull it off: his Scott switches from affectionate to courageous to complete asshole throughout the movie, but you never feel that the actor is struggling. A far cry from his performance in *shudder* "Year One."

With Wright, it was whether he can carry the magic he made with his own personal works ("Shaun of the Dead," "Hot Fuzz") into a picture based on someone else's genius. There are many directors who made their splash directing outside the box only to fall into the trap known as adaptation; for some it's become a default career choice (Tim Burton and M. Night Shyamalan, for different reasons). But the difference here is Wright doesn't approach this as "I'm the director so I'm doing this my way" as much as the Robert Rodriguez way of "I'm adapating as much of this as humanly possible without looking like a shameless cut-and-paste." And this works. I've read that Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith and other pseudo-quasi-indie directors have praised this film; but it's clear that only someone lie Wright could have pulled this off. Tarantino would have had decent fight scenes, but my God, the dialogue would have been awful. Smith would have gone video game reference crazy (trust me on this one). Adapted works need a delicate balance; the director has to understand that while you need to be true to the source material, the bottom line is movies are a different medium and the delivery may have to altered to fit it. Wright does that quite effectively.

So in all, I give the flick 3 &1/2 stars out of 5. Warning: if you've never even read the comic, let me just say that you shouldn't go see this looking for realism. Otherwise, you'll be just fine.