What is this review but an excuse to reiterate Matt’s glow after his screening earlier this week? Of course, there’s the old “and then some.” I went into Scott Pilgrim vs. The World with a smile on my face and I walked out unscathed. Is that supposed to be a good thing, something I should factor into my verdict? The movie, co-written and directed by Brit Edgar Wright, is one hell of a faithful adaptation. What really surprised me (let alone, I guess, the rest of the movie) was how shot-for-shot it was from its source material. The graphic novels penned by artist-writer Bryan Lee O’Malley are necessarily eccentric droll, and Wright captures that with an extra kick in the head that could be described as nothing short of Hollywood riff.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is about a 22-year-old kid named Scott Pilgrim who falls in love with a girl named Ramona Flowers, played by the beautiful Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Thing is Scott (Michael Cera) must first defeat her “seven evil exes”, the latter halves of past relationships that come at Scott like firepower. Wright’s fantasia hits it big not just in the screenplay he wrote with Michael Bacall, but in visual design. Much is due to cinematographer Bill Pope (The Matrix), but also to Wright, the breadwinner behind it all. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World takes you for a ride and leaves you left with more than you could ever hope for. You don’t only come out unscathed, but feeling like a winner. For sitting through a movie? Ha. Try bearing witness to 2010’s most inspired originality.

A balance is found here, somewhere in the middle that works, and someone smart decides to stick with it. That insane chemistry holding the movie together, having this character structure stay together while still allowing room to breathe, is spread throughout Wright’s playground like magic. From its opening, in which Scott’s band Sex Bob-Omb (like The Runaways on steroids) showcase for his high school girlfriend Knives Chau (exuberantly portrayed by Ellen Wong) to its final bang, Scott Pilgrim grips you. It doesn’t let up, not for a second. Wright’s wonderful creation ranks on Hollywood comic book movies while inventing a game-changing technique all its own. It’ll fit nicely amongst a niche audience, those of us who have waited for months and months to sight glimpse of it, but for the first time in a while I beg you to please see Scott Pilgrim. It’s too unique to be ignored, and far too fantastic to only be seen by a few thousand people.

Then there’s Scott, capsulated by the awkward go-to chum Michael Cera, here for perhaps the first time in his career branching out and playing the asshole. You’ll be shocked how good he is. He bounces from scene to scene, opposing person upon person like a live-action video game spectacle years in the making. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World will be called iconic, yet at the same time it’s funny how this tactic has just been sitting in front of us. There will always be more ways to innovate things, even the comic books like Scott Pilgrim, but it takes a certain type of talent to correctly highlight a heyday and not simply create further nostalgia with it, but craft attachments onto existing genres and so expertly smooth away the excess.

There’s a packed expression to each of these characters’ faces that’s as tongue-in-cheek as it is dark, likeminded as it is witty. Every sword or bass guitar Cera picks up only enhances the aura he glides across Edgar Wright’s visual landscape with. Take the childish antics done so well in Toy Story 3 and the diverse boldness and epic scale of Inception, and cram it into a movie with an individual form of amazement, about love and hate and everything in-between.

MUST SEE.