Scott Pilgrim, or Dare to Fail

[Multiple spoilers may follow.  Just sayin’.]

Recently I watched Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for the second time and roundabout the same time I had a friend telling me how very much he didn’t like the movie.  But as I was watching it I was mesmerized by the approach to storytelling the movie took.  It may well be, at least in this writer’s opinion, the most authentic translation of a comic book/video game to film – certainly the most ambitious.  It was a unique and fascinating experience.

And yet, for all its merits, Scott Pilgrim fails, in several ways.  The story itself is two dimensional.  The fight sequences began to seem unending.  Some of the plot twists were cliched (although still fitting.)  And if after you finish the movie you’re like, “What?  He chose Ramona?  What about Knives Chau?” you’re not alone – seems like that’s how the script was originally written before Hollywood got its claws into the film and forced a “Guy gets the Trophy Girl” ending.  Obviously if you ask me, Scott and Knives make a better ending.  Guess what?  They didn’t ask me.

However, my friend’s rejection of the movie led me to wondering – would it have been better if this movie hadn’t been made?  Do the admittedly considerable flaws relegate the endeavor of this film to the pile of “what were they thinking?” and “they should have known better”?

Actually, I don’t think so.  And there are two reasons why.

The first is that for all the movie does not give us, what it does get right is not only awesomely cool, but it’s awesomely cool in a new and unique way.  There aren’t many movies made like this – because what they tried to make was a funky, largely original concept (for a film).  So when you see an over the top battle sequence that thrills, and that ends with Scott’s vanquished foe bursting into reward tokens as blue “+2000” floats over his head – you notice!  In a way, this movie is an experiment at filming a story using the metaphors and language of comic books and video games, not the standard film techniques – and the unusual result shows that.

So you come away with many of these “wow” moments, regardless of how the film succeeds or not as a whole.  It’s just so damn authentic.  And the experience of those moments is something you aren’t going to get in most other films.  So Scott Pilgrim has that going for it.

But even if it utterly failed to produce any of those moments, it is vital that story tellers dare to try new things, dare to overreach, dare to fail, because without that audacity amazing opportunities will be missed.

And that’s really the larger point.  Scott Pilgrim (the film) was incredibly ambitious.  And even if they had failed from top to bottom (which they did not) I have to give them serious applause for what they were going for.  I have to support that kind of risk-taking – because those kinds of risks are exactly what leads to the truly mind-blowing successes when they do work.

So that’s the lesson of movies like Scott Pilgrim, or Chronicle, or even the venerable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  There’s a quote from another movie I like a lot, Stick It:

“Make [them] look. But I’m not talking about putting a cute smile on your face as if they’re doing you a favor.   Make them look. If you’re gonna eat mat, you eat mat hard. Don’t play it safe. You gotta throw your best tricks as hard as you can.”

All of us who run or play story games could take a lesson from this – and from Scott Pilgrim.

Be bold.  Be audacious. Dare to fail – spectacularly. Because not only will you create a spectacle – you may create moments of transcendence within your gaming group that will be part of each of you forever.  I know I have – and those moments are the greatest rewards I have ever gotten from story gaming.

Would you give that up?