Thursday, 15 September 2011

Cinema Review: The Troll Hunter


A group of students while doing a documentary about poaching discover the secret world of trolls.
Incredibly hyped this is certainly an original proposition. Vampires are so 2010! Now we have trolls.
This movie is very smart. The filmmaker went around the limitation of independent cinema by basically filming pretty normal stuff and pretending is something else. A fallen tree? Trolls did it. Power outage? Troll did it. A slavine? You know the drill by now.
Then there the trolls which are incredibly well realized for a independent production and could give a run for their money to most big budget movies. We need to go back to Cloverfield to get a creature so well realized.
Alas not everything is perfect. This is one of those movies who could benefit from a more stringent cut. First we wait forever to get to the troll hunting part which I assume would come to the surprise of no one considering the title. Then we lose a lot of filming time on trivial situation. Endless shots of our heroes getting in and out of the cars bring nothing to our experience.
I must also add that the Shaky Cam effect is in full swing and while Cloverfield managed to keep it under control and give us a pleasurable experience here we got a vague sense of sea sickness and a lot of confusion because it wasn’t possible to understand what’s going on.
The tone of the movie is strange. We expected a much more serious affair but instead we got a lot of dark humor. This made the movie very interesting and satirical, I’ll never forget the troll termination form, but in the end it was mostly missing in pathos, even during the last battle with the biggest troll. Speaking of which I honestly couldn’t understand the ending and therefore I left the cinema puzzled and slightly annoyed but maybe it’s just me.
A must see just for the sheer originality.

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