Review of Colossal (2017) by B J — 04 May 2017

Uneven, clunky, and disappointing, despite great performances and an enjoyable first half.

I enjoyed the first half quite a bit. In the first half you get to know Gloria, and though she's flawed and irresponsible, I found her charming and entertaining. Seeing Gloria's flaws and quirks was engaging and funny. She's a rather self absorbed insecure mess, but she is unapologetically herself. Her fumbled attempts to figure things out are engaging because she feels like a real person who makes mistakes and yet keeps going on undaunted.

But then things get crazy. I thought the premise of Gloria being connected to a monster in Seoul was ridiculous. Gloria, a woman with a messy life in a small town in America thinks she's important and powerful enough to be a monster with catastrophic potential and then it turns out she's right. I think it's pretty insane and problematic that Gloria's self absbored self aggrandizing notion turns out to be right. It's almost like the movie is promoting the self absorbed egocentric tendencies that are part of today's society.

Then once Gloria discovers her connection to the monster, Oscar abruptly turns into an evil controlling asshole. I was totally thrown when he went from small town nice guy to jealous controlling maniac. There was no nuance to Oscar once he was revealed to be evil. Suddenly he starts to emotionally and physically abuse Gloria, he destroys his bar by setting off fireworks, he's revealed to be a creepy stalker who shows up at Gloria's, and he's an asshole to his friends. Oh, and he's hoarder (I find it problematic that there's an apparent connection made between a mental illness like hoarding and Oscar's unhinged controlling violent ways). He's just too one dimensionally evil to be believable or engaging.

But my biggest issue with this movie is how it handles gender. This film is supposed to be a feminist movie, but I don't agree that it is. The film problematically present violence as female agency. Gloria never stands up or confronts the problematic way that Tim and Oscar treat her except with violence and self deprecation. At one point she agrees with Oscar that he should feel ashamed of his actions, but she never calls him out for anything specific. And the way she handles Tim's asshole behavior is just as halfhearted. All she does is not show up where she is supposed to meet him and then she says that she is really out of control (once she's in Seoul) so Tim can't handle her. By saying she is out of control she is basically saying that she is the reason that her and Tim's relationship can't work out, not the real reason which is that Tim is a condescending emotionally abusive jerk. And the only way she stands up to Oscar is by assaulting him. When she is the monster and she slaps Oscar the robot the film the glorifies this violence by women against men. What's up with the difference in the way violence from each of the genders is depicted? When she slaps and then punches Oscar it's triumphant and deserved but once it's the other way around the camera lingers on Gloria being hurt. Why is it okay that she hits Oscar but it's not okay that Oscar hits her? Gloria is totally helpless once Oscar violently hits her and she just passively lies on the ground once he's beat her up. The only way she can truly stand up to him is by becoming a super powerful monster. The film seems to be suggesting that women (as they are) are too weak to stand up to men and that the only recourse for women is extreme violence and even murder (aided by some outside source, in this case super monster powers, but in real life maybe some kind of weapon) to stop the men from abusing them. The only good avenue for resisting an abusive relationship is to run away as she does with Tim or to incapacite or kill the abuser as she does with Oscar. To me both of these methods are passive and problematic. Gloria just makes the problems go away somehow, she never confronts the men about why their behavior is not okay. I don't know. I'm a feminist so I tend to be overly sensitive to problematic gender dynamics, so maybe I'm reading too much into Gloria's methods of resistance. My main point is that I don't think violence is a good way, and not even an acceptable way, to resist an abusive relationship as it seems to be in the movie.