Scott Pilgrim vs The World

So, last week was pretty much Scott Pilgrim week for me since the movie and the game both came out and I reread all the books. For those of you not familiar, Scott Pilgrim is a graphic novel series penned by Bryan Lee O’Malley. It’s about a 23 year old guy named Scott Pilgrim who’s pretty much a slacker. He’s “in between” jobs, plays bass in a band called Sex Bob-Omb (obvious Mario reference), and is dating a high school girl. That changes when he meets Ramona Flowers, an Amazon.com delivery girl. They hook up and in order for Scott to continue dating her, he must defeat her seven evil ex boyfriends. Interesting concept, isn’t it?

That’s the basic premise of the story, but there’s so much more going on here too. What’s great about it is that it isn’t all about battling these evil exes, there’s many emotional layers too. The characters in the story all have flawed relationships and we not only experience what Scott and Ramona go through, but what all the others go through as well.

Now on to the main subject of this article, the movie. It’s directed by one of my favorite directors in the world, Edgar Wright, who previously worked on the TV series Spaced and most famously, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. If there was ever a perfect pairing of material and director, this is it. Edgar brings the world of Scott Pilgrim to life in an astonishingly stylish way that just leaps off the screen and grabs you by the throat. It isn’t all style though, there’s still all the emotional complexity of the novels. In fact, this is probably one of the better book to movie adaptations I’ve seen because Wright has such respect for the source material. It does start to veer off the storyline of the books about half way through the movie, but the plot points are mostly the same. The reason for that is because Edgar started writing Scott Pilgrim while he was working on Hot Fuzz, and not all of the books were out yet. So him and Bryan Lee O’Malley worked very closely on making sure the story was mostly the same.

And of course, the film retains much of the video game feel of the graphic novels and is littered with all sorts of pop culture and geeky references. There’s Zelda music (Koji Kondo is credited in the movie! ), Earthbound references, Final Fnatasy references, the 8-bit rendition of the Universal logo, and much more. There’s so much more I want to say about the movie, but I’d rather just leave you to go watch it yourself. If you’re a geek, and between ages 16-35 or so, this movie is tailor made for you. Be sure to check out the original graphics novels too. All 6 volumes are rather cheap on Amazon right now (like $7 per book). Here’s the trailer: