Troll

dir: Roar Uthaug

2022

No, it’s not about social media trolls. No, it’s not about the new king of the online trolls, being Elmo Husk. It’s about an actual, honest to goodness giant Troll that wreaks havoc upon the good people of Norway.

This is a film you have seen, if you’ve seen movies, many times before. You probably haven’t seen that many Norwegian movies, but that hardly matters. You have seen movies where a giant creature of some description and some origin wrecks a bunch of shit, kills a bunch of people, can’t be stopped with guns, and only stops right before the end credits, thanks to…something.

It’s easy to call it a monster movie, or, if you think the Japanese should have a monopoly on these kinds of movies, you’d call it a kaiju movie. It’s very much a kaiju movie, except with a giant troll instead of Godzilla.

Because this is a very crowd-pleasing version of this kind of movie, they even say “Godzilla” and “King Kong” a bunch of times. They want you to know that it’s that kind of movie. So they helpfully tell us.

The main character of this flick is a palaeontologist. It’s never good when government officials seek out palaeontologists for anything. Mayhem, and likely murder will ensue. But what I found funny is that something happens that the government can’t account for, they get the palaeontologist on board, ask her opinion, and then go “this chick is fucking nuts”, and then laugh at her.

Why ask the palaeontologist in the first place, you Norwegian rollmop-eating jerks? If you were never going to entertain her ideas, why bring her along?

It’s no good seeing footage of giant footprints and then scoffing when people say “they’re giant footprints”. When you do that, you should know you’re the real villain in the movie, and not the monster.

Nora (Ine Maria Wilman) is the palaeontologist in question. Don’t let her messy hair fool you – she’s an expert in her field. At the beginning of the film there’s a scene where she’s working with American academics as they excavate a site looking for fossils. After weeks of finding nothing, seconds before the dig is to be shut down, she randomly selects a section of beach, starts digging, and immediately finds an entirely intact skeleton.

What are the odds? Well, I am an expert in this field, so I would argue the chances are slim to bupkiss, but I may be wrong.

She is swiftly hurried away from the hilariously uncomplicated dig site to a meeting with The Most Powerful Persons in Norway. It includes generals and ministers and stuff, but, most importantly, the Prime Minister (Anneke Von der Lippe), who mostly sits around desperately hoping no-one calls on her to express an opinion on anything, or to make any decisions.

No-one accepts anything Nora has to say, but that is the way all great scientists in human and Norwegian history: dismissed as fools at first, and later everyone pretends they were besties from the start. The film takes a lot of time mocking both environmental activists in general and specifically. The initiating incident involves the government blowing up part of a mountain for some kind of tunnel, and the activists protesting, most of whom die along with the people working there, are mostly all young and female, and they’re ever so ineffective. Later on someone specifically mentions “Greta”, just to show you whose side the jerks are on.

I was amazed there were no jokes about vegetarianism or mockery of tofu consumption, or whatever the Norwegian equivalent is. Something something oat milk.

Nora ends up with a team of people who believe in her, being Andreas (Kim Falck) who is an adviser to the Prime Minister, an army captain who tells Nora to call him Kris (Mads Sjøgârd Pettersen), and, eventually, Nora’s dad who everyone including Nora thinks is crazy (Gard B. Eidsvold).

Nora’s dad Tobias is crazy. But he’s not wrong. Institutionalised for expounding on a truly bizarre theory that the monarchy of Norway was founded literally on the bones of exterminated trolls, Nora is disgusted by the very presence of her father, but because she can’t believe what’s happening, she goes to find the one guy she doesn’t trust so he can tell her what she doesn’t want to hear or believe until it’s too late.

Twice father and daughter joke about certain moments not being moments of reconciliation and the like, in a manner that makes it sound like the screenwriters, at some point, marked a part of the screenplay saying “here is where we should have some dialogue where the father and daughter reconcile a bit”. Later on there would have been a post-it note saying “here, just before he dies, they should have another reconciliation scene after a pointless fight and tell each other how much they love each other.”

Yes, it’s formulaic, but formulas work. Formulas get results. This flick goes out of its way to be as generically enjoyable by a majority of people, whether they speak Norwegian or not. Even with the subtitles off you’d probably get what was going on most of the time.

The government adviser Andreas is, I think, meant to be like a comedic sidekick, but I couldn’t really get most of his references, other than they make him out to be a gigantic nerd. He has a good friend in the military called Siggy (Karoline Garvang) who does all the tech related hacking this, hacking that stuff that the plot needs, and she also, like Andreas, speaks entirely in nerd-related references, whether it’s Star Trek or Lord of the Rings bullshit.

I’m telling you, filmmakers of all nations, stop lionising nerd characters. Continuing to do so now when almost all media is beyond nerdy, when the worst nerds seem to have achieved terrible positions of power thanks to the bug-eyed salamanders that rule Silicon Valley, will only speed up the downfall of humanity.

Maybe that would be a good thing? As generic as I’ve made the plot of this sound, and it is, the actual explanation of what’s happening and why is pretty specific to the nation of Norway, dealing as it does with specific myths and legends that originated there and have flowed out to the world over the centuries.

I’m not saying it’s a good explanation for what’s happening and why, I’m just saying it’s not commonplace. It’s not nuclear testing, it’s not genetic engineering, and it’s not aliens.

It’s something Christians did. The troll, in all his magnificence, hates Christians.

As for the troll itself, well, it’s awfully convenient that it generally only appears at night. I mean, I know that’s part of the myth, which conveniently applies and then conveniently doesn’t seem to apply when the plot dictates.

It looks like a tall, bearded, bald guy made of stone. And he’s sad, because all his family are dead.

It might bring a tear to your eye. The troll isn’t that scary, really, but that’s okay. He just has to be huge, and has to tear shit up at will, and be immune to bullets.

At one point, as if this were an American movie, after shooting a million bullets at it, the authorities convince the Prime Minister that the only way to kill it must be to use nuclear fucking weapons, and, as such, when the creature strides purposefully towards Oslo, they are about to nuke the whole city.

I find it very hard to believe Norwegian people would act in this kind of way. It’s insane. I understand why you do it in a script set in the States, or Texas, or especially Florida, but I don’t buy that Norwegians would kill millions of people just to stop a stone guy. Luckily, nerds will be nerds, and so…

The characters in these kinds of flicks tend not to matter but I did like the central performances. However absurd the requirements of the script they treat it seriously but not too seriously, grounding the absurdity without resorting to camp or winking at the audience. I liked Nora as the lead, and Kris as the army guy who wasn’t too much of a jerk.

Maybe I didn’t like so much how there’s a clear set up for a sequel, because it really doesn’t need one, but I did laugh at the end when they bombastically play that most bombastic of pieces of music, being “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt which everyone knows, whether Norwegian or not.

Troll maybe isn’t great, but it’s plenty good enough.

7 ways in which it’s a fun night out at the movies, especially when it’s on your own couch and on Netflix out of 10

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“What if I told you a thousand years ago trolls wandered this earth?” – I would say they never left, mate, they just bided their time until the internet came along - Troll