Entertainment
Anne Hathaway’s Out Of Control In Netflix’s R-Rated Sci-Fi Comedy
By Robert Scucci
| Published
When I was younger and still looking to make reckless decisions, there was a friend in my group who we referred to as the Hurricane. The reason we called him that was because when he had a few too many drinks, he’d start destroying things for fun. He was the kind of person who would bodyslam himself through a beer pong table or run full speed into a display at the convenience store while we were looking for a quick, late-night snack. We stopped hanging out with him because the collateral damage left in his wake was a blast radius we no longer felt like cleaning up.
Watching 2016’s Colossal brought back memories of those days because its protagonist is similarly destructive while drinking, though in ways that don’t mirror real life. Here, our hero Gloria (Anne Hathaway) finds her body controlling a Godzilla-like creature located in Seoul, South Korea whenever she gets wasted in her hometown of Mainhead, New Hampshire.
Splitting its narrative between both locations, Colossal tells a story about a woman coming to terms with her self-destructive behavior because she has to. Her actions have very real consequences on the other side of the world. Whenever she gets lost in the sauce, a single step in the wrong direction could destroy buildings and kill hundreds of people.
Unemployed Writer Turned Godzilla
When Colossal introduces us to Gloria, she’s an absolute wreck. An unemployed writer who’s hitting the bottle a little too hard, Gloria is kicked out of her New York City apartment by her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens), who’s had enough of her late-night blackouts and violent hangovers. With no job prospects or anywhere to live, Gloria moves back to her now-empty family home in Mainhead, New Hampshire to get her head on straight and figure out her next steps. There, she meets up with Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), a childhood friend she hadn’t talked to in years.
Taking Oscar up on his offer to help out at the bar his late father left him, Gloria finally has work, but more often than not spends her time on the clock getting drunk with Oscar and his other employees, Joel (Austin Stowell) and Garth (Tim Blake Nelson). Closing up shop and stumbling home around the same time the school day starts for the neighborhood children, Gloria cuts through the local playground at 8:05 am, thinking nothing of it until she watches the news later that day.
When Gloria learns about the giant, Godzilla-like creature attacking Seoul, South Korea, she’s at first panicked by the global implications. Those worries shift when she notices the correlation between her presence on the playground and the monster’s appearance. Though it makes no logical sense, Gloria surmises that her body is remotely controlling the monster, and she has the power to destroy entire city blocks just by waving her arms around. This remote relationship with the creature is confirmed when the monster is attacked by the military, as Gloria also feels pain when helicopters and rockets crash into it.
After explaining this phenomenon to her friends, Oscar learns that the same thing happens to him when he enters the playground at the same time. In Oscar’s case, however, he turns into a giant robot. Gloria is horrified by the amount of damage she is capable of causing and vows to quit drinking so nobody else gets hurt. Oscar, on the other hand, gets a sick thrill out of the power that he possesses and turns it into a deadly game whenever he lets the booze take control.
An Anthropromorphized Allegory
While it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s happening in Colossal, it’s still a clever way to look at how Gloria’s self-destructive behavior affects more than just herself. Every time she steps onto the playground, hundreds of people are displaced or killed by the monster she controls. Just like for any person in your life who may not be able to control themselves when they party a little too hard, there are unintended, potentially wide-reaching consequences tied directly to their actions that could be avoided entirely if they just stopped doing what they’re doing.
In Gloria’s case, her drinking compromises her relationship with Tim, and her subsequent spiral causes a catastrophic amount of damage far away from where she’s located physically. While all she has to do is sleep off a hangover after stumbling home, other people have to deal with her mess, which rings true for anybody who’s ever been friends with this kind of person.
What separates Oscar from Gloria is that he’s totally fine with the way things are shaking out. Gloria feels remorse and vows to improve her situation by attempting to go sober. Oscar, on the other hand, likes the power he wields over the citizens of Seoul and loves to watch the world burn because he wants everybody to be as miserable as he is. These two personalities, constantly at odds with each other, make for a compelling drama on their own. Colossal takes this tension and turns it into a literal battle between a giant reptile and a robot, using Seoul as their battleground while the whole world watches on TV.
Colossal starts off feeling like two different movies, and in many ways it is. If you remove the monsters, you get a dramedy about a woman moving back to her hometown to face her personal demons. If you remove Gloria, you get a lizard fighting a robot with zero context.
Together, they make for an interesting allegory about substance abuse and facing yourself after your bad habits destroy your life. To experience both of these stories converging in a single place, all you need to do is stream Colossal on Netflix.