Colossal by Nacho Vigalondo (review)

Nacho Vigalondo has done it again – he's managed to surprise the viewer with an unusual, intriguing and very original movie. Characteristically, Vigalondo does not explicitly define the genre of his new movie – for him, sf is merely an excuse to create a dramatic situation between his protagonists. Just as with the time travel that ends up with the main character's fight against himself in Timecrimes (Vigalondo Spain 2007), or the arrival of giant UFOs in Madrid that are used as an excuse to leave a couple and the protagonist's lover isolated in Extraterrestrial (Vigalondo Spain 2011). In Colossal, the presence of the monster and the robot are primarily an engine to generate dramatic tension between his characters.

When we meet Gloria (Anne Hathaway), Colossal's chief protagonist, she is forced to leave her boyfriend's (Dan Steven) flat in New York City due to her alcoholism and general lack of responsibility. She decides to return to her childhood home, where she runs into Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) – a school friend with whom she will form a peculiar renewed relationship. Against this mundane situation, a sense of drama, horror and fantasy in the story is introduced by news reports about a gigantic monster that tries to destroy the city of Seoul – a monster Gloria comes to realise she unconsciously controls.

Popular criticism of Colossal has associated the film's monster with the iconic monster from Godzilla (Honda Japan 1954). This comparison began with Vigalondo himself, who appeared to emphasise that link between the Japanese monster and Colossal to promote his film – a fact that resulted in the owner of the original Godzilla's film rights bringing a lawsuit against the Spanish director. This uproar, alongside the appearance of the monster on the film poster and other promotional images, helped secure Colossal in the long list of kaijû eiga (Japanese for 'monster movie') films.

During the Cold War, radiation and nuclear energy generated fears on both sides of the Pacific, represented by terrifying creatures such as the giant ants in Them! (Douglas US 1954) or in the radioactive cloud that shrunk the main character from The Incredible Shrinking Man (Arnold US 1957). But the monstrosity of nuclearism is most indelibly associated with Godzilla, which translated the terror of the bomb into a giant monster that bedevilled (and later, protected) the Japanese population for decades.

Colossal brings back the tradition of gigantic cinematographic creatures, but now divorced from the nuclear conflict that gave birth to the explosion of the genre in the 1950s. Despite the responsibility for the death and destruction that Gloria feels, the telepathic connection between her and the monsters largely remains a mystery – and when the time comes to explain this strange phenomenon, it turns out to be disappointing. After wildly speculating for half an hour on all the various possibilities, the viewer finds out that this connection, and so the whole story, has its origin in a freak event: the monster from Colossal is the result of Gloria being struck by lightning – which happened when, as a child, Gloria was walking to school with Oscar, carrying a scale model of the city of Seoul.

Colossal's giant creature is thus a metaphor that has no relation with social forces or collective fear, but rather with Gloria's own individual and highly subjective fears – the fundamental conflicts of a woman in her thirties who hasn't been able to get her life together, either professionally and emotionally. This young woman has to come to terms with her past – and only by uniting and compromising with the creature will she gain the sense of responsibility needed for her to mature. Confronting the monster and characters from her childhood (like Oscar, who controls a giant robot also attacking Seoul) helps Gloria evolve until she learns to prioritise what is truly important. Once the monsters have been defeated (or maybe because she fights to defeat them), Gloria is able to take back control...