- Joined
- Sep 13, 2018
Since I don't have a YouTube channel to annoy people with, I'm doing this here, for you guys. Aren't you lucky?
Troll Hunter was one of my favorite films of 2010, and has since managed to remain one of my favorite movies of it's ilk. It's certainly my favorite found-footage movie, but it's better than that very low bar would suggest. So when I first saw trailers for Troll, I was excited - it looked to be a sort of spiritual successor to Troll Hunter. To be clear, it isn't in any way actually connected, they just share a similar premise.
Well, it finally came out. I eagerly got a snack and a drink, turned down the lights, and loaded it up. It's a Netflix Original movie, which... didn't fill me with lots of confidence, but it's not not quite the mark of death it sometimes gets made out to be, so I was hopeful.
Did it deliver?
... Kind of. In places. But there are a lot of missteps along the way. Be warned, there will be some spoilers going forward, but I'll try to skip any major ones.
I'll talk about the good parts first.
The special effects are decent. They're not AAA blockbuster special effects, but they do their job, they don't intrinsically grate, and the titular CGI troll emotes believably and actually manages to come across, ironically, as one of the more human characters by the end of the movie.
Some of the acting is decent. Ine Wilmann does a decent job as as the lead character Nora Tidemann, and Gard Eidsvold as her father Tobias was probably my favorite character. Although, I'll admit, I usually like "old wise nutjob" characters, which is Tobias through and through. He isn't any deeper than that, though, and once you get over some minor familial strife with her father, neither is Nora anything other than just a plug-and-play protagonist. There's really nothing specific she brings to the story. The rest of the characters... I'll talk about later.
The movie is fun! It really is. There's a few good special effect action shots that are fun to watch, there's actually a couple of quite clever scenes in fact - one of their attempts to stop the troll, while ultimately a failure because of their own incompetence, was actually both clever and kind of unique.
But...
The movie just doesn't know what it wants to be.
I would say about 2/3rds of the movie tries to take itself seriously. In fact, it's so sharp a divide that it's almost like there are two different directors directing two different movies that just happen to be connected. Basically, when the focus is on the troll, or on Nora and her father, the movie wants to be (at least somewhat) serious. Nora's father is occasionally a bit of comic relief, at least when he's first (re)introduced, but things are handled fairly seriously.
Then there's any time the focus is on the government employees. Then it's a low-budget fauxbuster made by The Asylum or something. The people behave in unrealistic, unbelievable ways, are pure cardboard stereotypes, and some of them are straight up played for laughs - Kim Falck's Andreas and Karoline Garvang's Sigrid are the standout examples here. Falck is your typical bumbling, charmingly awkward government functionary type. His character doesn't offend in his ineptitude, he's just... awkward. I think we're supposed to find his behavior silly and funny, but it's mostly just obnoxious. However, much more offensively, Garvang plays Sigrid, a... Well, it's never made exactly clear what her job is, but she wears a uniform and sits in front of a computer in the government command center. And she's a terminally socially awkward nerd. Who is also a world-class "hacker" in the way that only bad movies understand the concept. In one case she somehow remotely hacks a cellphone from afar to find stored video footage on it. In the climax of the movie, she uses her work computer to hack into a jet fighter in flight to disable it's nuclear weapon. Oh, yeah, spoiler, they planned to nuke the troll. Then she punches out the Stock Government Character(Wants to Nuke Shit-subtype) when he tries to over-ride her and do it anyways. And when that happens, after she's sabotaged government operations and assaulted her superior officer, is she... shot, arrested, even rebuked? No, everyone just kinda looks at her and gives her a thumbs up with their eyes.
There's also a horrible, horrible example of what I call Scully syndrome. At the point in time when everyone in the government has seen absolutely incontrovertible video evidence of several-stories-tall humanoid made of stone that is very clearly alive and real, and in fact several people involved had had direct first hand experience with said behemoth, Nora sternly pleads with her father "Whatever you do, don't tell anyone it's a troll." Seriously? I know you're trying to portray Tobias as the "crazy old crackpot" character, but the "only crackpots believe in trolls" ship had long sailed at that point in the movie.
Finally, and I admit this is probably me overthinking it, but we are told - spoilers - that trolls used to be common in Norway before it became a Christian nation, then somehow they were all killed off. Except, we are shown a modern, first world military is unable to even slow a single troll down, much like a Norwegian Godzilla - a reference the movie humorously makes, at one point. We even get the whole Kaiju-movie scene of of the military throwing everything they have at the troll, and he just shrugs it off. Okay, fine. Then how did a bunch of medieval folks with spears and swords manage to kill even a single troll, much less all of them? Yes, they have a couple of weaknesses, which the movie shows, but not ones that would allow some late-era vikings to slaughter the entire species.
All that having been said, would I recommend the movie?
If you liked Troll Hunter (I do), or are a fan of Kaiju movies (I am), then yes, absolutely. Even if it's not great, it will scratch a similar itch as those things, and be at least worth a watch.
But is it a good movie? No, not really. I'm not sure I'd say it's a terrible movie, but it's very average, and has a serious identity problem that makes the whole affair less than the sum of it's parts in a very unfortunate way. I wanted to like this movie, I really, really did. And... All I can say is I didn't hate it. But if you have the right niche interests, it's still worth a watch. So no, it's not a terrible movie, but it could have been better, and it ultimately just wasn't what I hoped it was.
Troll Hunter was one of my favorite films of 2010, and has since managed to remain one of my favorite movies of it's ilk. It's certainly my favorite found-footage movie, but it's better than that very low bar would suggest. So when I first saw trailers for Troll, I was excited - it looked to be a sort of spiritual successor to Troll Hunter. To be clear, it isn't in any way actually connected, they just share a similar premise.
Well, it finally came out. I eagerly got a snack and a drink, turned down the lights, and loaded it up. It's a Netflix Original movie, which... didn't fill me with lots of confidence, but it's not not quite the mark of death it sometimes gets made out to be, so I was hopeful.
Did it deliver?
... Kind of. In places. But there are a lot of missteps along the way. Be warned, there will be some spoilers going forward, but I'll try to skip any major ones.
I'll talk about the good parts first.
The special effects are decent. They're not AAA blockbuster special effects, but they do their job, they don't intrinsically grate, and the titular CGI troll emotes believably and actually manages to come across, ironically, as one of the more human characters by the end of the movie.
Some of the acting is decent. Ine Wilmann does a decent job as as the lead character Nora Tidemann, and Gard Eidsvold as her father Tobias was probably my favorite character. Although, I'll admit, I usually like "old wise nutjob" characters, which is Tobias through and through. He isn't any deeper than that, though, and once you get over some minor familial strife with her father, neither is Nora anything other than just a plug-and-play protagonist. There's really nothing specific she brings to the story. The rest of the characters... I'll talk about later.
The movie is fun! It really is. There's a few good special effect action shots that are fun to watch, there's actually a couple of quite clever scenes in fact - one of their attempts to stop the troll, while ultimately a failure because of their own incompetence, was actually both clever and kind of unique.
But...
The movie just doesn't know what it wants to be.
I would say about 2/3rds of the movie tries to take itself seriously. In fact, it's so sharp a divide that it's almost like there are two different directors directing two different movies that just happen to be connected. Basically, when the focus is on the troll, or on Nora and her father, the movie wants to be (at least somewhat) serious. Nora's father is occasionally a bit of comic relief, at least when he's first (re)introduced, but things are handled fairly seriously.
Then there's any time the focus is on the government employees. Then it's a low-budget fauxbuster made by The Asylum or something. The people behave in unrealistic, unbelievable ways, are pure cardboard stereotypes, and some of them are straight up played for laughs - Kim Falck's Andreas and Karoline Garvang's Sigrid are the standout examples here. Falck is your typical bumbling, charmingly awkward government functionary type. His character doesn't offend in his ineptitude, he's just... awkward. I think we're supposed to find his behavior silly and funny, but it's mostly just obnoxious. However, much more offensively, Garvang plays Sigrid, a... Well, it's never made exactly clear what her job is, but she wears a uniform and sits in front of a computer in the government command center. And she's a terminally socially awkward nerd. Who is also a world-class "hacker" in the way that only bad movies understand the concept. In one case she somehow remotely hacks a cellphone from afar to find stored video footage on it. In the climax of the movie, she uses her work computer to hack into a jet fighter in flight to disable it's nuclear weapon. Oh, yeah, spoiler, they planned to nuke the troll. Then she punches out the Stock Government Character(Wants to Nuke Shit-subtype) when he tries to over-ride her and do it anyways. And when that happens, after she's sabotaged government operations and assaulted her superior officer, is she... shot, arrested, even rebuked? No, everyone just kinda looks at her and gives her a thumbs up with their eyes.
There's also a horrible, horrible example of what I call Scully syndrome. At the point in time when everyone in the government has seen absolutely incontrovertible video evidence of several-stories-tall humanoid made of stone that is very clearly alive and real, and in fact several people involved had had direct first hand experience with said behemoth, Nora sternly pleads with her father "Whatever you do, don't tell anyone it's a troll." Seriously? I know you're trying to portray Tobias as the "crazy old crackpot" character, but the "only crackpots believe in trolls" ship had long sailed at that point in the movie.
Finally, and I admit this is probably me overthinking it, but we are told - spoilers - that trolls used to be common in Norway before it became a Christian nation, then somehow they were all killed off. Except, we are shown a modern, first world military is unable to even slow a single troll down, much like a Norwegian Godzilla - a reference the movie humorously makes, at one point. We even get the whole Kaiju-movie scene of of the military throwing everything they have at the troll, and he just shrugs it off. Okay, fine. Then how did a bunch of medieval folks with spears and swords manage to kill even a single troll, much less all of them? Yes, they have a couple of weaknesses, which the movie shows, but not ones that would allow some late-era vikings to slaughter the entire species.
All that having been said, would I recommend the movie?
If you liked Troll Hunter (I do), or are a fan of Kaiju movies (I am), then yes, absolutely. Even if it's not great, it will scratch a similar itch as those things, and be at least worth a watch.
But is it a good movie? No, not really. I'm not sure I'd say it's a terrible movie, but it's very average, and has a serious identity problem that makes the whole affair less than the sum of it's parts in a very unfortunate way. I wanted to like this movie, I really, really did. And... All I can say is I didn't hate it. But if you have the right niche interests, it's still worth a watch. So no, it's not a terrible movie, but it could have been better, and it ultimately just wasn't what I hoped it was.
