Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

We are Sex Bob-Omb! One-two-three-four!

I watched Spaced through recently. Sadly it's not aged very well. Not because it wasn't great, because it was, but because, much like Seinfeld, today we're so familiar with the things that made it special that looking back makes it seem oddly cliché. And worse, those elements, the cutaways, the use of pop culture references, they're almost always used poorly. So I went into Scott Pilgrim with a sizable amount of trepidation. I was worried that even Edgar Wright could not find something fresh in the techniques he'd all but pioneered.

But these fears were unfounded. And how. It instantly establishes the smart, funny, chaotic, musical world in which it takes place. Obviously referential, I imagine there's a risk of excluding some, but isn't that half the fun of the reference? It's laugh out loud funny. The characters are instantly identifiable yet all well formed and engrossing (of special note: his gay roommate Wallace who hogs many of the finer lines. "Watch out! It's that one guy!") and the soundtrack is stonking. It's enormously dense: visual gags, sharp dialogue, references and music all fly fast and indeed furious. It has to move at some pace to contain so much, but it's also surprisingly economical.

It contains just enough, literally the minimum amount of the teenage romance tropes to make the relationship recognisable from similar stories, all while viciously beating those that surround them to death. While not in any way deep itself, it artfully and surprisingly avoids being the kind of shallow romance nonsense we're so often saddled with. I found myself wondering why he should be interested in the apparently troubling girl based purely a dream, but it really doesn't matter. It is all to serve the humour and never to supersede it.

I'm actually annoyed with myself for avoiding it until now. I was seriously concerned that it would be too similar, too trite, too platitudinous (I definitely get thesaurus points for that one) but as it happens there are simply not enough things like Scott Pilgrim in the world. At least there is one.