Film Review: Colossal

An inveterate alcoholic, Gloria (Anne Hathaway) — the once professional, now-fired blogger — gets kicked out of her live-in boyfriend Tim’s (Dan Stevens) pad for her all-night drinking bouts, and er, a little bit of lying.

Heading back to her parents’ unused home in New Jersey she chances upon her old classmate Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) who now runs his ancestral bar-cum-restaurant.  A meeting later, Gloria agrees to work in the bar. It’s a perfect set-up for Gloria who spends her after-duty hours boozing with Oscar and his friends Garth (Tim Blake Nelson) and Joel (Austin Stowell).

So far so good.  A good half hour into the film, Director Vigalondo introduces the giant monster who, at a precise time, wreaks tsunami-like damage upon the residents of Seoul, S. Korea.  Vigalondo establishes the sci-fi moments barely minutes into the film with shots of school-going children witnessing a frightening phenomenon of a monster in the sky.

As realization dawns on Gloria that her movements and actions coincide with, and control, those of the monster’s half way around the globe, the rest of the film revolves around Gloria’s relationship with the three men, with Tim attempting a comeback into her life.  The film pivots around the monster who’s now found a robot to contend with. Gloria, the principal character in this film, is seen fighting her demons with almost every male character in the film.

A sci-fi film barely if ever has a compelling, let alone credible, storyline and amidst some comic elements, Hathaway and Sudeikis turn in more than decent performances. Also, there are times when the viewer would have let slip from memory the primary genre (sci-fi) of the film. But with the monster and robot dancing, fighting and wrestling, and with dialogues such as ‘I killed a shitload of people because I was acting like a dunk idiot again’, Colossal misses its mark by a distance.