The Definition Of Awesome: My Scott Pilgrim Review

I surf the 'Net a lot when I'm not in the Adobe Creative Suite designing something, but recently I've been falling off of my routine site visiting and blog reading. I made a pit stop at IGN Movies and saw a feature on this film called Scott Pilgrim vs. The World....looked interesting so I thought I'd take a peek. Once I saw the comic book-themed scenes and heard the video game sounds from Sonic and Mario (the "KO" sound especially), I was sold. Not long after that did I enter a contest to win a free screening pass for two courtesy of Advance Screenings (which everyone should follow on Twitter!), and got a phone call from a random number that I didn't answer, but left me a voicemail saying that I won my screening pass!

Talk about excited! I brought one of my friends with me to go see the movie last Thursday, and it definitely didn't disappoint. What I saw in the trailer is exactly what I got - Scott Pilgrim is a 22-year-old Canadian trying to romance an out-of-towner named Ramona Flowers, but in order to finally go out with her he has to defeat her seven evil exes....oh, and he's in a band; nothing more complicated than that, as the method in which he gets there is entertaining enough without a convoluted plot. From the opening digitized Universal opening screen, to the ending 8-bit music, I was captivated. The movie did a good job of easing those of us who aren't familiar with the Pilgrim into his world, replete with snarky text boxes and onomatopoeia. Speaking of that, the visible onomatopoeia is EVERYWHERE in this film - I'm sure the Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright and series creator Bryan Lee O'Malley went to great lengths to make the film look as much like a comic book as possible.

Earth's Mightiest Heroes vs. The World's Greatest Detective

The history of comic books being translated to the screen - TV and movie - has been checkered in its beginnings. For every Adam West, there was a Nicholas Hammond. For every George Reeves, there was a John Wesley Shipp. (For every Superman movie, there was a Superman 3!) but the genre has taken off recently, what with the success of the Spider-Man franchise last decade to kick things back off, then the wildly popular Iron Man to piggyback off of that wave, leading into the blockbuster (and one of the most successful films of all time) that was The Dark Knight. Movies with smaller spotlights but great results such as Kick-Ass and the upcoming Scott Pilgrim vs. The World are benefactors of such successes. Gone are the days of half-ass representations, second rate heroes who had no business being adapted in the first place, flagship heroes who were unceremoniously pushed back into sloppy seconds (I know - I have this one on tape for some reason), and of course, the movie that almost ended it all.

Two years from now, the failures and successes of these adaptations will contribute to the biggest summer that comics have ever seen, and probably will ever see - the ensemble cast of the Avengers opens on May 4th, 2012, with the third entry in Christopher Nolan's Batman series opening two and a half months later, on July 20th. So which one do I bet on having the bigger box office pull?