I have to open with that because at some point I am going to become the “But the comics were so much better!” guy and I want to minimize the damage of that before I do. I’ll try to put that off as long as possible.
 

Scott Pilgrim, played by Michael Cera (Juno, Arrested Development), is a 22 year-old slacker/geek drifting through life. He has a band, Sex Bob-omb. He has a gay roommate/mentor. He has a tragic past. He has a new seventeen year-old girlfriend. All that changes one day, as a girl rollerblades through his dreams and into his life. That dream girl is Ramona Flowers (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead – Live Free or Die Hard), and Scott is immediately obsessed. There is a catch. In order to date Ramona, Scott has to fight and defeat seven of her evil ex-boyfriends. So begins a fun journey through a world of band battles and boss fights, heavily inspired by video game sensibilities and glossed over with some slick 8-bit CGI and tinny digitalized sound effects. The visualized sound effects of the comics also make an appearance, providing some extra stylization for certain scenes.
 

The film manages to preserve a lot of the humor of the books while adding its own layer of fun on top of material taken from the graphic novels. The action scenes are fast-paced and fun, with each fight having its own distinct musical style and beat. The action gets a little frenetic at times, and definitely favors flair over substance, but it doesn’t forget to be amusing and fun. Some people (myself included) were worried about Michael Cera being Scott, since Cera has a pretty set character type that he doesn’t venture out of often and that Scott Pilgrim didn’t seem to fit within (though I was optimistic about Cera after seeing him in the trailers…).  Luckily, Cera the actor and Pilgrim the character meet halfway, and so while Michael Cera doesn’t exactly escape his traditional character, he makes it fit the role so that everything works out. The cast doesn’t stop with Michael Cera, though. The film has a huge cast and each actor bears a remarkable resemblance to the characters from the comics. The acting itself is a little cheesy and over the top, but again, this is a movie that puts style before substance, and fun before anything else, and the performances do inspire plenty of laughs.
 
Special Features:
The Scott Pilgrim Vs the World Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy release is filled with special features. Highlights include: Deleted/Alternate Scenes with commentary from Edgar Wright, Making of Scott Pilgrim Documentary, Pre-Production Featurette, and Scott Pilgrim vs the Bloopers.

Check out all the fantastic special features below:

• Commentaries:
  • Director/producer/co-writer Edgar Wright, co-writer Michael Bacall and author Bryan Lee O’Malley
  • Technical Commentary with director/producer/co-writer Edgar Wright and director of photography Bill Pope
  • Cast commentary with Michael Cera, Jason Schwartzman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong and Brandon Routh
  • Cast commentary with Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, Kieran Culkin and Mark Webber
• U-Control: Storyboard picture-in-picture (BD-exclusive)
• Trivia track
• Deleted and alternate scenes with commentary from Edgar Wright
• Insider documentaries (BD-exclusive)
  • Making of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
  • Music Featurette
  • You Too Can Be Sex Bob-Omb
• Alternate footage: A special look at alternative edits to the film (BD-exclusive)
• Pre-production: A look inside the film’s pre-production process including storyboards, pre-visualizations, animatics, motion capture tests, rehearsal footage, casting tapes, hair/make-up tests and more (BD-exclusive)
• The Music of Scott Pilgrim vs. the world: including four complete music videos and video remixes from legendary DJ Osymyso (BD-exclusive)
• Visual effects (BD-exclusive)
• Sound work (BD-exclusive)
• Trailers and TV spots (BD-exclusive)
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the Bloopers
• Behind-the-scenes
• Adult Swim™: Scott Pilgrim vs. The Animation (BD-exclusive) (BD-exclusive)
• Scott Pilgrim vs the Censors: TV-safe version (BD-exclusive)
• Behind-the-scenes production blogs by Edgar Wright from the set of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (BD-exclusive)
• Behind-the-scenes photo galleries including Edgar Wright’s photo blog
• Galleries: production photos, art galleries and marketing concepts
• Pocket Blu (BD-exclusive)
  • Advanced Remote Control
  • Video Timeline
  • Mobile-To-Go
  • Virtual Keyboard
• BD-Live

Overall:

The film is also remarkably faithful to the books, doing as much as a two hour movie can do to recreate a six book comic series in film. Specific bits of dialogue, gags, scenes, and even whole pages of comic book action are specifically re-created in the film. The film even uses actual animated frames of the comic book for flashbacks.  In most cases where the film deviates from the comics, it does it to do a scene or gag that film as a medium would do better than the comic equivalent would have if translated directly. But this is where I have to play the elitist comic book nerd and pull the “But the comics are better!” card, because the one thing that this two hour film can’t do is tell the entire story of Scott Pilgrim. It tries very hard, and is mostly successful. But in the end, condensing a six volume series that is supposed to take place over the course of a year into a movie that takes place over a couple of days doesn’t feel the same had the story taken place over a longer period of time.
 

If you’re familiar with the books, here is how things work out (if not, skip the rest of this paragraph. Please, for your own good.): Volume 1 (Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life) is told almost verbatim through the first act, though some of the transitions get kind of frantic to make everything fit. Then you get a couple of scenes that tell the story of Volume 2 (Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, the volume that gives the film its title). Then Volume 3 is condensed into a single scene and Volumes 4 and 5 disappear completely, with their characters getting mixed into the a series of scenes that kind of make sense. And then they finish things off with a scene that is superficially similar to the recently released Volume 6, except without any of that pesky character development getting in the way.
 

In case you’re one of the people that skipped that last paragraph, the point I am making is that in order to fit everything into a shortened film version, important parts of the story like character development are completely disregarded. In the books, the ups and downs of the relationship between Scott and Ramona were believable in part because they date over the course of a year before things start to go sour; in the film, they’re dating for all of a week and yet we are expected to believe that they actually love each other? A lot of people criticize the comics for simply being a flashy story about a hipster douchebag who thinks his life is a video game, and that isn’t exactly fair. The comics go way beyond that, establishing some real motivations behind the characters as they (especially Scott) realize their mistakes in life and grow. But the film doesn’t give the characters time to grow and mature, it stays almost completely on the surface, with a few hints of character development at the end. And thus the film remains a flashy story about a douchebag whose life takes place in a video game (though I don’t know where people get the hipster part – either they don’t know what hipsters are, or they haven’t actually read the comics…).
 

But in the end, the film had to excise a lot of character development and proceed forward at a frenetic pace to fit everything into film-time, so that all we were left with is a fun action-comedy with an awesome soundtrack, stylized fight scenes, and a ton of video game references (the amount of Zelda music used in the first act is criminally awesome) and really, that isn’t bad at all. If you want to have an enjoyable time at the movies this summer, and don’t particularly care about substance in your comic book movies, you should go see Scott Pilgrim VS the World.

ComicsOnline gives Scott Pilgrim VS The World 4 out of 5 video game references.

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