Don’t Overthink I Kill Giants

The trailer led me to believe I would be watching a bizarre fantasy film with family drama as a side part of the story, but it turned out to be a wholesome family picture with characters who are struggling to confront difficult life situations. With some small fantasy elements in there for fun. I can’t protect you from the spoilers down below.

Based on the graphic novel written by the same person who wrote the screenplay, I Kill Giants gave an interesting trailer, but the film was quite different to what I was expecting it to be. At its core is a story about a young girl failing to confront her mother’s illness and hiding it in fantasy delusions. Now delusions may be a harsh word for it, especially when the film has an attitude where it’s up to you whether you think these giants actually exist, for the majority of the film. The ending sours this theme a little at the end, but I’ll talk about that when I talk about the plot. The film is primarily a character film with a constant plot beat throughout, but nothing special. It’s heartwarming and provides great character arcs, and overall the film is incredibly pretty in a bizarre way since there are barely any wacky or bright colours. Now onto the plot.

Throughout the film, we follow Barbara who claims to fight and kill giants so that she can protect her town. It’s a nice premise for the film and sets up an interesting world where you have multiple fantasy and sci-fi elements weaved into a very human story in a realistic modern earth. It has that graphic novel feel while being a mostly live action. Barbara meets Sophia who has recently moved into the area from Leeds, England. Adjusting to life in the US, Sophia tries to befriend Barbara who is considered crazy by most of her peers in the school. Their relationship develops a little with Barbara telling her about giants and the traps she uses to stop them. We also get introduced to the school counselor, played by Zoe Saldana, who is trying to get to the bottom of what Barbara means when she talks about fighting giants. The film does a nice job of switching between scenes at school and in the counselor’s office showing the ‘real world’ and dealing with the consequences of what is at play, with the scenes in the wilderness and in her sanctuary showing the heavier fantasy parts of the film. It balances it extremely well to the point where as soon as you start believing the giants to be real, it switches up and converts you to believing they aren’t and continues going back and forth throughout the film to the point where it doesn’t matter if they actually exist or not. We learn more about Barbara as we slowly gain information over the picture. It gets revealed that the name on her bag, Coveleski, is named after an obscure baseball player who played for the Philadelphia Phillies. At the time, the information isn’t too relevant but it becomes apparent where everything is leading to. If anything, the game is given away a little too earlier but the film continues to hammer in the hints to the point where I was staring away from the screen shouting ‘I know that already.’ The counselor learns about the baseball link with Coveleski and confronts Barbara with it. Barbara finds herself in a dazed and confused state and ends up slapping the counselor and punching Sophia without realising it was her. Sophia runs off and the school bully convinces Sophia to show her some of the weird stuff that Barbara does. The bully destroys some of the traps but Barbara interrupts and goes to fight them with her hammer. After drawing it out of her bag, it turns out it’s a small animal’s jawbone tied to a stick. Confused at why it isn’t the hammer she expected it to be, the bully and her two friends beat her up. After getting knocked out, Barbara wakes up in her house upstairs. Annoyed at Sophia for taking her upstairs, she tells her to go downstairs before ‘it’ sees her but Sophia looks into one of the rooms and drops the glass of water she was holding. Barbara then stops going to school for a few days, leading Sophia and the counselor to go to Barbara’s house. We get more information into the details they are hiding away from us. While Barbara’s sister, who looks after her, is talking to the counselor about how hard it is at the moment, Sophia goes into the house and looks in Barbara’s room in the basement. She finds recording of Barbara and her mother talking about Coveleski and how he was the giants killer on the Phillies as he helped beat the New York Giants baseball team frequently. Again, it’s one of the points in the film where it makes us doubt the stories of these giants. But again we are thrown back in the other direction when Barbara goes to fight the giant that has been wandering around the woods for the duration of the film. She eventually defeats it, but when Sophia arrives, she only sees the destruction of the abandoned train yard. We then move into the final part of the film where, after humiliating the school bully, Barbara runs off again, thinking that something big is coming. On her way to it, she is interrupted by the counselor who tells her that her mother is wanting to see her. It finally falls into place that her mother is alive and that her obsession with killing giants is a way for her to cope with her mother’s illness and the stark reality that she is probably going to die. She runs off though, and makes her way to the beach where Sophia turns up. Throughout the previous parts of the film, an impending storm is reported on new channels as well as the weather in other scenes repeatedly getting worse and worse. As the storm arrives, Barbara tells Sophia to hide and as she does, a giant arises from the ocean but Barbara notices it is one of the titans, the biggest of the giants. She nonetheless continues to try and fight it and as she does, Coveleski comes back to her and she draws out a huge hammer. After a fight she eventually defeats the titan but he reveals that he wasn’t there for Barbara’s mother but for Barbara herself. They finish the fight hitting each other and both falling into the sea where the storm is. While under the water, the titan speaks to her and encourages her to enjoy life and to realise that death is a natural part of it. She accepts this and swims to the surface. The next day she eventually motivates herself to walk upstairs and approach her mother’s bedroom door. What follows is my main problem with the whole film. Barbara hesitates before entering but as she enters (before they cut to inside the room) is where I think they should have ended the film. It would reduce the film down to about one hour and twenty-nine minutes but I feel it would keep the film’s themes concise and at the forefront of the picture, but instead we get about eight or nine additional minutes of story. It’s not badly written but a little rushed and unnecessary. The main themes I got from the film were about confronting any fears of death and proceeding with life as full as you can. So the most important action Barbara takes in the whole thing is being able to walk into her mother’s room. Though the studio probably wouldn’t have been happy since the film would be further away from the Hollywood average of two hours and fifteen minutes that they want to get as close as they can to. But that’s the only thing I dislike about the plot. It isn’t fantastic, but then it doesn’t need to be with the focus on characters it does.

Talking about characters, let’s start off with Barbara. First off, Madison Wolfe gives a great performance. Although she’s done a few films before this one, it’s the first time I’ve seen her in a feature film. I hope to see her in some more pictures in the near future. The character isn’t too unique, even though it’s a character that is meant to be unique within the world they’ve set up. Although she does change for the better, it doesn’t flow very well. The build up is great, but the actual change is very brief and suddenly very easy for the character to make. Supporting her for most of the film is the other child actor that I think will have a successful career is Sophia, played by Sydney Wade. I had a bizarre feeling while watching her scenes that she was a thirty year old actor who had been put into the body of a teenager. Maybe she reminds me of another actor and that’s why I’m thinking that, but it was quite weird and put me off a little at the beginning of the film. But that’s on me, not the actor. Apart from a few awkward lines at the beginning of the film, which you can attribute to the character being nervous when first meeting Barbara, she was particularly great at the one on one scenes with Wolfe, resulting in great confrontations and dialogue. The counselor, Mrs. Mollé, is as good a performance as most of Zoe Saldana’s. Unfortunately, we get very little development out of this character but there’s a reasonable amount of potential there that was most definitely wasted. The voice acting for the giant and the titan was reasonable, giving a warm and looming voice to the project. And then finally we have the best performance in the film, Barbara’s sister Karen, played by Imogen Poots. It’s powerful and real while contrasting effectively with the other characters who fit more into the fantasy elements of the film. Although I have praised the acting all round, none of it was particularly spectacular. So with reasonable story and characters the only thing that makes this film stand out enough for me to take time to write about it is it’s visuals, which I will talk about in a bit, as well as the atmosphere. I’m not sure if I have mentioned this before, but the feeling of a film, tv show or piece of music is one of the most important parts of that piece of art.

Talking about visuals, the film’s visual identity is fantastic. It gives a great colour scheme that makes sense considering we are in the real world but also makes it look like a fantasy picture while using those real world colours. Weather is an essential part of the film and the expertly involve it into the story, slowly building up the ferocity with cool shots. The CG was a bit of a mixed bag. Parts of it, like her hammer and the sigils in the trainyard fight looked fantastic and gave that extra sense of magic to the show. However, the giant, the titan and the Harbingers, although amazing in design, did not look good at all. Now, you could argue that it was on purpose considering they are meant to be her imagination, but I think that the idea of ‘you never know whether they’re real or not’ is a crucial and great part of the film that needs to kept. Same reason as to why I think that the film should have been cut earlier, the answer to whether they are real is irrelevant. What’s important is the actions that Barbara takes during the course of the film, and whether they are believable or not to keep up the magic of film.

Sound design is not too bad in I Kill Giants, but I didn’t notice it too much. I unfortunately can’t remember a single track from the soundtrack apart from the first credits scene song. But the sound design for the fantasy elements is pretty good. Coveleski has little sparks when powered up, giving it a little extra force in the scene it’s in. It needed that extra force, since the scenes with it in didn’t make it look that heavy or that you needed to put much energy into swinging it. Again, you can make the same argument that it is imaginary but by now, you should already know my response to that. But the main thing I would like to see better is the soundtrack. The fact that I can’t remember more than one song is both disappointing and sad.

I Kill Giants is a reasonable drama film that cloaks itself in fantasy to get across points in an interesting way. If the film had no fantasy elements in it at all I probably wouldn’t have gotten past the trailer. It lured me in, but I’m okay with that. I enjoyed myself. Give it a go, but don’t buy a physical copy. The ‘From the producers of Harry Potter’ block of text tilts me off the face of the earth.

Existentially, yes.

-Boad

Originally published at bodaciousboad.wordpress.com on September 17, 2018.