Colossal

I get the premise, and I get the connections to the kayju genre. That gets the movie out the door, and keeps things moving. Where this movie falls flat is the characters and plot development. Other reviewers have nailed it: It's as if the middle of the movie was missing. *Spoilers below* You have very flawed, but bordering on real characters, and then within a blink of an eye, one turns into pure evil. And not only that, but the character has always been this way? You get one flashback that begins to set that up, but then ultimately delivers nothing. I didn't believe his transition, and even if I'd wanted to, the movie only gives you about 20 minutes to come to terms with it, before it ends. They tease out interesting concepts – e.g. "I got drunk and, because of that, my kayju avatar killed a bunch of people." The moment they start to explore that, the movie races to the finish line, and skips over a needed section of character and plot development. Ultimately, I felt like I'd received the appetizer and dessert, but the restaurant forgot my entree.

Fist off, this is a good film. Let me get that out of the way. To h*ll with the haters. It's smart. Clever. Unique. If you pay attention there are plenty of gags. Hathaway shines and all the rest. It's just NOT the film the trailers lead people to believe, and I really hate that. The trailers filled seats with people who were expecting to see some quirky romcom and instead they got 'Annie Darko' and wound up hating it. And this is a major pet peeve of mine. The same thing happened with "White God" This kind of advertising always backfires. The PR dpt just puts together any trailer they think will fill the seats on opening night, then it brings the wrong audience and hurts the film in the long run. Colossal should have been advertised like "Motorama" or "The Dark Backwards"... or "Eating Raul". It's a dark edgy comedy and it's not supposed to be of the 'wacky wild hilarity' genre'. OK, it's not a life altering cinema, but it is far better than most of the critiques I've read. And one thing all those critiques had in common...? They all said it wasn't what they were expecting, or it couldn't figure out what it wanted to be. Wrong. The film was exactly what it was trying to be. The viewers just couldn't figure out what it was doing because they all thought it was trying to do something else.... primarily because of the way it was presented. Not that it's easy to describe. Just abandon your preconceived notions before you watch. I actually like it better than the film I thought it would be.