At several points during Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a quote by Socrates flashed into my mind. That's a sentence you didn't expect. Perhaps further throwing off your expectations, the quote is, "Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers." That quote has always stuck with me, because he said it (if he really did) around 400 B.C..
While every generation has certain unique qualities, we all forget (or haven't yet realized) that virtually everything is just the same old thing, even the wildly new things. We largely grow up working on the theory that people like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Voltaire, etc., were all born eighty years old, and set out with the mission of simply arming teachers with implements of torture. It doesn't occur to us that they might have been speaking to a young generation, suffering through horrendously "real" life because their family was in debtor's prison, or that they became writers by rebelling against their parents.
Every teen who sneaks out of the house to see a band thinks he invented the idea.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is in fact a somewhat revolutionary effort in the realm of film, and perhaps art... it's an allegory... that isn't.
Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is an averagely nerdy chap in his early twenties. He's in a band, sees little in his future, and is dating a High School girl largely out of a lack of self-esteem. He soon meets Ramona Flowers, his dream girl, literally. Instantly smitten, Scott finds himself dizzied by the quite natural inability to act or think when it comes to the girl who is too cool for him, and terrifyingly not entirely not interested in him.
With all the charm, and most of the hipster references, his generation can muster, Scott muddles through the initial stages of being aware someone else exists with the studied lack of aplomb that very nearly defines the video, video game (and dare I say, screening) reared youth of today.
Surging forward into the deeper relationship levels of awkwardly walking near each other and so forth, Scott is suddenly attacked while performing with his band, and learns that he must defeat Ramona's seven evil exes in order to continue their relationship. As the video game metaphor muscles its way in more and more, Ramona's baggage continues to appear before Scott, attempting to knock him down, demanding to be defeated.
Flying fights, wild techno-rock riffs, power ups, and finishing moves all carry us, and Scott, toward the final boss fight, and the cutscenes (as usual) tell the story. Not only a story about love generally, and the fear and loathing of courtship, but a story about generational confusion, distance, and animosity.
Unapologetically arming detractors with more ammo than they could possibly use, the film is flippant in its destruction of its own media, burying both the seemingly senseless use of pseudo-magical powers by people with no such power, and the lack of any discernible reaction by onlookers underneath a shiny veneer of disinterest in your arbitrary "rules."
Buoyed almost unbelievably by winsome performances, not only by its leads (who are perfect), but by wonderful supporting turns by: Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong, and Mark Webber, the film's only flaw is its anti-marketing marketing. Its meta too-cool-for-schoolness. A fact perhaps a shade too well proved by its box office.
Big, brash, and filled with more fun than your average ten movies, Scott Pilgrim is bursting with the celebrated wit and wisdom of younger generations at large, and nearly cloying in the perpetual perfection of its muse's feverishly anti-mawk mawkishness.
It's unclear if we have something here (in form, not "goodness") like On the Road, Please Please Me, or Candide (for pure smartassness), or just something much more humbly like The Breakfast Club, or Closer (Joy Division), but what is clear is that Scott Pilgrim is like nothing you've ever seen before... just like all those other things.
It is rich and complex to a degree only achievable by those things that scoff at richness and complexity, and fueled by the baffling power of an allegory that begins by telling you that the love interest's exes will be represented by the love interest's exes. A metaphor built out of a decade of widely accepted misuse of the word "literally." Which is brilliant.
It also precisely as appreciable, vibrant, and alive to its demographic (of all ages) as this review is, perhaps, not.
Rating: 
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© 2010, Are You Screening?. All rights reserved. Reprinting without express permission of the author is prohibited.
About Marc Eastman
Marc Eastman is the owner and operator of Are You Screening? and has been writing film reviews for over a decade, and several branches of the internet's film review world have seen his name. His reviews have brought him personal praise from the director of a major motion picture, and have been used as required reading in a course at a major University. These priceless rewards, along with just bags of cash, keep him from straying from freelance writing. He is also a member of The Broadcast Film Critics Association and The Broadcast Television Journalists Association.
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