Troll

When a gigantic troll is awakened from its thousand year slumber deep within a Norwegian mountain, a ragtag group of heroes must come together to try and stop the ancient creature from wreaking havoc on the modern world, before the country’s leadership tries to stop it themselves, by using a nuclear missile…

That the inciting incident that sets off the events of this movie is the drilling of controversial rail line’s tunnel deep within the mountain of Dovre, Norway, waking a Troll, hundreds of feet tall, made of stone and earth, and able to smell the blood of Christian men, a monstrous creature once believed to have only existed in fairy tales, is a perfect encapsulation of the film’s main conflict, the modern versus their myth, science versus magic, the constraints of logic and reason versus wild and unfettered imagination.

Troll is basically a Scandinavian Kaiju movie, mixing together pieces of King Kong, Godzilla, and Jurassic Park, with more than a little bit of Independence Day thrown in for a bit of extra flavoring too. This might make the film sound dumb, mostly because it is, but still, it’s also a really good time.

My only issue with the film is how, at its core, its meaning and tone is at war with itself. It clearly wants the destruction and explosions, it clearly wants the stomping about, the running, and the screaming. It clearly wants the big bombastic action set pieces because that’s all the film really is… spectacle.

But…

It also clearly wants the troll itself to be representative of the victims of colonialism, of the physical, emotional, and cultural tragedy that comes with imperialism. It clearly wants the Troll to be this massive lumbering metaphor for all the native cultural ideas and traditions that have been stolen, mocked, destroyed, and cheaply commodified by the victorious colonists, a litany of additional harms inflicted on native people after their massacre at the hands of the bloody-minded hordes of Christianity.

The film wants you to cheer the destruction of the monster, because y’know… it’s a giant monster that’s knocking down buildings and swallowing people whole, but it also wants us to realize that the true monsters were actually us all along, and not just us, but the system as a whole, the very idea of progress too, the wide wide width and breadth of the “modern” world. The film wants you to feel that deep loss as we destroy something that was here long before us, something that belongs here more than we do, something that should have more of say when it comes to determining the future of this place than we, the usurpers, do, and while the film doesn’t exactly fail at this… it’s often a very rough tonal shift between these diametrically opposed intentions.

Basically, it’s hard to cheer our victory as the sun rises on the modern world, safe again from those who would do us harm, all while the last bit of true magic cries out mournfully, as it burns away like fog in the new day’s light.

Still… the film is fun.