I love anything involving Kaiju related monsters no matter what the premise is. While not all of them deliver, when I saw the trailer for Colossal I was instantly intrigued with the potential direction I thought the film might go. It features a great cast including Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Tim Blake Nelson, Dan Stevens, and Austin Stowell, but does director V/H/S: Viral and The ABCs of Death segment director Nacho Vigalondo manage to inject this story with the needed formula to make it as interesting and fun as it appears or will it be unable to smash its way to success?

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Colossal follows a woman discovers that severe catastrophic events involving a gigantic monster are somehow connected to the mental breakdown from which she's suffering. Going I had an idea to the kind of film I was in for based on the trailer, but I was pleasantly surprised to how much more it delivered. This is a dark comedy that screams originality all while having familiar elements of other kaiju films. While the monster plays a major part in this story, it is really a character study of a woman trying to get her life together on numerous levels. Her unexpected connection with an old friend serves up an almost average romance tale at first, but quickly starts to go in all sorts of unexpected directions making the film so much more than it might have been otherwise.

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The connection to the monster takes it to a whole other level and gives the characters something to bond and fight over, but as big as the chaos is that the monster is causing it is small in comparison to what they are all dealing with. This is a hard film to review because any remote discussion to where it goes takes away the charm and fun of it all so I am going to keep it to a minimum and say it is worth it in the end. The effects of the creature and the destruction it causes is really well done especially for the lower budget that the film works with. The cast are all great and makes this a film that was a breath of fresh air that blended the creature feature, romance and drama all together in one big smash of awesomeness.

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This is a less is more film, meaning try to keep as much information as you can secret until you actually see the film. It will make the experience of it all so much better. I loved the cheesy ending of it all and all of the quirky moments and dark turns that I did not expect. I applaud director Vigalondo for making a film like this that will clearly only work for some people, but if you can let yourself go and just dive in you are in for a great treat of a film.