Gideon powers up before the fight and fades along with his health bar.Įlsewhere, Stacey is rated T for Teen, a reference to ESRB games ratings, and a Street Fighter "KO!" sounds whenever bosses are beaten.
SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD GAME MOVIE MOVIE
The film is most explicitly a video game movie during his final fight with Gideon (before which Wallace encourages his ex-flatmate to "Finish him!" – a Mortal Kombat reference). Aside from using his extra life, Scott also earns the powers of love and self respect by publicly professing his love for Ramona and being honest with the women in his life respectively, while the Chaos Theater is literally represented as Level 7. This character demands a more elaborate fight and is, naturally, the toughest of all to beat. This is certainly true of the diabolical Gideon who took, like, two hours of his time to assemble the League and for whom Scott requires a couple tries to beat - echoing how gamers generally don't beat the Big Bad first time around.Īlong with beating the bosses and completing the levels, Scott must pick up points, knowledge and tools along the way to help him with his battle. He or she typically battles a heap of regular toughs, such as the hipsters in the Chaos Theater, or Lucas Lee's stunt doubles, before facing the boss at the end of the level. This unique character can either be extra tough to beat, or some sort of puzzle - for example, Scott beats Todd Ingram by tricking him into drinking half 'n' half, baby, thereby costing him his powers.Īt the head of the game or, in this case, the movie is the final boss, the main antagonist of the story. Usually, classic games position the player to fight through an organization to reach the Big Bad. Add the fact that Gideon has assembled the League for this specific purpose, and we're in serious video game territory. Each story beat is a level, with a boss to beat at the end. The structure of the film is assembled loosely in the style of a video game. The change is earned (in fact, Wright actually tells us what kind of film Scott Pilgrim is right from the very beginning, with that ear-worm, 8-bit Universal theme). From Young Neil actually playing Zelda on camera, to Wallace's collection of real, working consoles and classic games, this is a film that wears its references proudly on its sleeve (switch on the DVD/BD's trivia track to spot ‘em all).Īs a result, when the action transcends into full-on video game territory, it makes sense. On the other hand, when virtually anything happens in House Of The Dead, it's immediately questioned, because what the hell is going on in that movie?īy integrating a million references to video games, and video game culture, into the narrative, Scott Pilgrim anchors the story in the real world. Watching Scott Pilgrim, we never question why Scott has to fight Ramona's seven evil exes in the first place, or why coins rain down upon each knockout.
It's a live action comic book, a goofy, underdog rom-com and an action movie all rolled into one.īut, by loading the flick up with endless video game nods and aping the structure of classic, side-scrolling beat 'em ups such as River City Ransom (a huge influence on the graphic novels and the super fun tie-in game), Wright arguably created the strongest video game movie of our time. Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, Edgar Wright's thrilling adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's popular graphic novel series, is ostensibly not a video game movie. Doom may be kind of a cult favourite, but neither it, nor the dreaded House Of The Dead is winning any points for being, you know, a decent movie in its own right. How does a filmmaker go about adequately replicating the (very personal) player experience, in an entirely different medium, one where the viewer isn't in control of the action?įilm adaptations of Resident Evil and Silent Hill are almost too loyal to the source material. Video game movies are, by their very nature, problematic. Hardcore Henry comes out this weekend ( you can buy tickets here), and to celebrate, we're going to spend the week looking at films that share some element of its first-person, video game inspired aesthetic.
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