Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Scott Pilgrim lives in a world in which the ordinary is extraordinary, where imagination and exaggeration runs wild.

Edgar Wright has always mixed the incredible with the mundane.  With Spaced, he turned a story about two friends sharing a flat into a surreal mainstream success. With Shaun of the Dead, the first rom-zom-com, Simon Pegg played a salesman trying to piece his relationship together as Zombies began to take over the world. In his most recent film, Hot Fuzz, Pegg and Frost play policemen in a sleepy Westcountry village stumbling upon a murder spree. In each of these, Wright has made the ordinary, extraordinary. Now, it seems he has officially landed in Hollywood (minus Pegg and Frost) with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

The concept Scott Pilgrim seems to mesh well with Wright’s skillset. It is a world where reality mixes with the MTV, Nintendo, slacker Generation Y – or whatever words are used to describe the ‘yoof’ of today. It is a world populated with computer game homages, extra lives and villains who explode into coins. More importantly, it is a world in which the ordinary is extraordinary, where imagination and exaggeration runs wild.

Scott Pilgrim has taken a while to get over his ex-girlfiend who dumped him, signed a record deal with a major label leaving his heart in pieces. When he meets a girl at a party and starts to get to know her, it quickly becomes apparent that he will have to defeat her seven evil exes to continue to date her. Throw into the mix a battle of the bands tournament with his band (the sex bob-ombs), a Chinese stalker and the teenage angst of trying to win the relationship of your dreams and you have Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

The film is based on the graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley and stays completely faithful to the series. It is a cacophony of intertextuality; love hearts float in the air, words fly out of noisy objects, one scene even has a sitcom audience soundtrack. There are so many video game references that a person unaware of the source material may well have thought the idea emanated from a different medium. It is no surprise, then, that the film is being released alongside the old-school style arcade game. The Street Fighter-like duels between Scott and the evil exes were the most effective of these homages. There are times in which these sequences became exhausting but it never felt like the film ran too long. Wright manages to completely encapsulate the feel of the graphic novel in this world and these characters and, in this kind of adaptation, I don’t think there is greater praise.

A role has never been more seemingly suited for anyone than Scott Pilgrim is for Michael Cera. To say he is typecast is a huge understatement. Michael Cera is Scott Pilgrim and is just brilliant in the role. He is helped by a wonderful cast; Anna Kendrick is just a fantastic actress, it is probably safe to say that Kieran Culkin will be the brother with the most successful post-childhood career in his family, and the exes (that include Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman, Chris Evans and Anne from Arrested Development) are all unique in their individual traits.

The plot and characters are held together by a script that is intelligent, topical and, most importantly, funny.  It meshes seamlessly with Cera’s unique delivery and timing and it’s the type of dialogue that is evident in all of Wright’s films, the type that will only grow better and better with repetition.

This is Edgar Wright’s best film to date. It is the originality and innovation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World that raise his stock even higher. Just like the title character, he truly knows how to take the mundane and make it incredible.