At first I thought this was just a low budget movie that had done a good job of finding an Anne Hathaway look alike, but turns out it really is Anne Hathaway. This is an odd movie. One of the rules of sci-fi is to not explain too much, but I think they might had kept a few too many secrets to themselves in Colossal.
At first Colossal looks like your average Rom-Com about a 30 something failure who moves back home. Well, that is if you overlook the opening scene of a little girl in South Korea confronting a Godzilla sized monster. That was 25 years ago.
Anne drinks too much and makes poor decisions as a result. So natch she gets a job at a bar owned by someone she went to grade school with. He also drinks too much and makes poor decisions. After an all nighter she wanderers through a playground near a school. Later that day she wakes up and sees on the news that a monster has attacked South Korea.
One of the few funny bits happens when she calls her ex to talk about the monster attacks. “That was hours ago.” he says as if a fifty foot tall monster rates the same amount of importance as the latest photo of Kim Kardashian’s butt.
Mixed in with the loser love story are a few flashbacks of Anne and the barkeep as kids. They have a couple of dioramas that are being blow around in the wind. Anne’s model flies over a tall fence and the boy climbs the fence, we assume to retrieve the model. The young Anne follows him, only to find him stomping the model of, wait for it, South Korea.
Then the two kids appear to die in some kind of freak lightning storm. This little scene kind of throws the rest of the film out of kilter. Did they really die and all the rest is a dream? Did they cross into some other dimension? Since it’s clear that little Anne hates the boy now, why does she spent all her time with him once she goes back home?
In the end, we are left hanging with a lame joke. No explanations, no reasons, no answers. I kind of like my movies to make a little more sense.
