Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

**J_Th4ng** · 17-01-2011, 02:57 PM

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[/info]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446029/

Old school gamers will love this movie from the moment that they see the universal pictures logo displayed in a pixellated manner, accompanied by an 8-bit synthesised theme tune. The film states its intent immediately – it’s a geeky, funny film paying plenty of homage to the games industry, particularly those old Nintendo classics like the Mario games, as well as generic fighting games like street fighter and tekken.

As far as stories go, this one’s rather weird. The titular Scott Pilgrim is a 21 year old member of a local band, called the Sex Bob Ombs. He’s a bit of a geek, and hasn’t been the same since he was dumped by his girlfriend, almost exactly a year previously. He has just got himself a new girlfriend, a 16 year old Chinese high school girl named Knives Chau, much to the consternation of his friends.

Shorthly after the start of the film, Scott meets Ramona, who he soon discovers to be ‘the girl of his dreams’ (quite literally, in fact). Once he eventually gets together with her, Scott finds out that he’s going to have to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends in single combat.

The story is weird, but it’s very entertaining. The film was adapted from a series of comic books by the same guy that made “Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Hot Fuzz’. Is has a lot of comic book touches, in that there are a lot of written sound effects and descriptions of what is going on written on the screen.

The fight scenes are pretty impressive. For sure this is no exercise in violence like we saw in films like ‘Ninja Assassin’, but the fight scenes are still pretty spectacular. Scott inherits martial arts skills for his fights, and all of the enemies have special powers that he has to defeat. A great nod to Nintendo is that all of the enemies explode into a shower of coins when they get defeated, while Scott gets awarded points for the victory.

It’s hard to explain why this film is so enjoyable. Certainly the first 20 minutes had me scratching my head and wincing every time Scott Pilgrim opened his mouth, but as the movie progressed and I adjusted more and more to the weirdness that was unfolding, the more I enjoyed it.

I must say that this film turned out to be one of the best that I’ve seen for quite some time. Maybe it was because I was stuck in Pakistan when I watched it, but I found it a great way to spend a couple of hours of my time.

For me, this movie was a solid 9 out of 10. I enjoyed it so much that I’d like to get hold of an HD copy of the film, because I’m sure I’ll watch it again. I do have an SD copy if anyone would like it.