Troll

 Troll (Roar Uthaug Netflix 2022) is a throwback -- a film that plays as a homage to classic Japanese kaiju movies, that is, movies featuring giant monsters rampaging through modern cities.  Troll is wholly lacking in irony and, certainly, doesn't wink knowingly at its audience.  Rather, the film replicates the narrative structure of kaiju movies, lovingly staging action scenes typical of this genre, even borrowing the rather simplistic, one-dimensional characters that inhabit this  kind of film -- there is a plucky lady-scientist, her handsome, if feckless, male sidekick, a doughty soldier who works with the heroine to ingeniously outwit the monster, and a full complement of somber government leaders (here the female prime minister of Norway), sleazy political operatives, trigger-happy generals in full uniform and the like.  There's even a feisty girl computer whiz who cold-cocks the nasty political operative to the implicit satisfaction of the matronly prime minister and her grave and dignified general.  There is absolutely nothing novel or sophisticated about this film and this is, at once, its charm and its primary weakness.  We've been over this territory many times before and the movie really has nothing to add to the genre -- indeed, Troll has no ambition to expand the genre.  

I saw Japanese Kaiju films on TV many, many times when I was a child and, as a  consequence, I have a sort of primordial affection for the genre that defeats my rational skepticism about this kind of movie.  These things are guilty pleasures to me and, as an adult, I have sometimes snuck away to movie theaters to enjoy Kaiju battling with one another on the big screen.  These films are judged according to the plausibility of their special effects (or according to the beauty of these effects if they are grossly unrealistic -- as, for instance, in the first King Kong).  The problem for a contemporary viewer is that special effects laden picture (for instance the DC and Marvel Comics franchises) present audiences with four or five outlandishly spectacular and photographically realistic miracles even before the opening credits.  Therefore, viewers are now jaded and special effects can't really save the day with regard to movies of this form -- thus, Troll's rather retro insistence on the classical tropes defining a Kaiju movie isn't really enough to keep the audience interested.  And, for the record, I rate the creature effects in Troll at no better than a solid C to C+ effort.  But the movie is sufficiently effective for me to recommend it to fans of the genre.

A father and his spunky ten-year old daughter are climbing a fantastically  spectacular mountain in Norway.  (Norway is so incredibly beautiful that it beggars description -- the whole country looks like Going-to-the-Sun Highway in Glacier National Park.)  At the summit, the father and his daughter gaze across the abyss at a serrated ridge of peaks and the man urges the girl to imagine the peaks as petrified trolls.  She does as he says and the peaks morph into massive man-mountains with troll faces.  Twenty years later, the girl is now a woman, leading a paleontology expedition, again in a spectacular fjord in Norway.  Some bones are discovered.  Meanwhile at Dovre Mountain, construction workers are drilling a tunnel through the peak while protestors demonstrate about the desecration of nature.  Something awakens during the blasting and attacks the miners and the protestors burying them in tons of mud and rock.  The creature stomps away leaving swimming pool-sized footprints in the mountain meadows.  The girl paleontologist is brought to the scene of the carnage in a helicopter.  After some exploration of ominous gorges in the mountains, the heroine with her sidekick, Andreas Isakson, and a hunky commando named Helm, encounter the troll.  The creature is pretending to be a big, massy granite outcropping.  The monster chases them, but they escape.  Norway's greatest expert on trolls and troll-lore is the heroine's father -- he's reputed to be a madman and lives in a remote cabin that he defends with his shotgun (people have tried to have him committed as insane).  With her father and much of the Norwegian army, the troll is ambushed in a forest in the mountains.  The troll kills just about everybody including the paleontologist's father.  During this fight, a soldier recites the Lord's Prayer to the anger of the troll, who is a pre-Christian heathen monster, and the creature eats the hapless trooper.  As it turns out King Olaf, the ruler who converted the Norwegians to Christianity in 1000 AD, defeated the pagan trolls and, it seems, lured them to his castle in what is now Oslo where the entire race was massacred -- except one (or, perhaps, two) critters that survived.  Trolls hate church bells which remind them of King Olaf's treachery and so the Norwegian air force attacks the monster with helicopters dangling enormous iron bells -- the troll knocks down the helicopters with impunity, a bit like King Kong batting away biplanes from his perch of the Empire State Building.  The troll, then, sets off to ravage Oslo, returning to the site of the massacre a thousand years earlier.  (Oslo is a humble-looking city without any spectacular skyscrapers and with few landmarks known to anyone but Norwegians -- the troll contents himself with strolling down the four-lane highway leading into town, an unimpressive rampage since there are really no buildings in the vicinity.  The heroine has now figured-out a way to trap and destroy the troll and uses a commando group of Muslim special forces to defeat the monster -- presumably, these non-Christian troops are not as exposed to the troll's anti-Christian  depredations.  By this time, the troll, like King Kong, has become a rather sympathetic figure and, as with the giant ape, in the last ten minutes of the movie's operatic action, the audience comes to sympathize with the huge brute.  The troll is destroyed.  Everyone rejoices at the huge pile of gravel that is all that remains of the monster, But, in the bowels of Dovre Mountain, something is stirring.  

This is all nonsense and, as I've noted, the creature effects are mediocre.  But some scenes are impressive, particularly those involving huge walls of granite that suddenly develop glaring eyes.  There are plenty of explosions and balls of fire at the climax.  Oslo is a poor foil for the troll -- there's really nothing of any value for the hapless brute to destroy.  Nonetheless, I liked this movie because for its conviction as well as its conservative approach to the genre and its conventions (these films are always best before the monster goes on his or her rampage).  My taste is idiosyncratic and most audiences won't be much impressed with this movie.

(The troll is like one of Emil Nolde's grotesques, amusing images of  jocular giants in the form of Alpine peaks.  I have near my desk a Norwegian postcard that I bought at the Ibsen Museum showing a mountain troll strolling through Victoria-era Oslo -- this image plays a key role in the film's plot.  Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" is reserved for the final credits, ruinously truncated by Netflix in its rapacious desire to lure viewers to watch some other film -- I recommend that you let the credits roll to their conclusion to enjoy Grieg's music composed for Ibsen's Peer Gynt.)