The internet is dumb, and by all accounts the movie industry is even dumber. When you combine the two, you end up with all the people bemoaning the “lamentable” box office for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and trying to figure out what went wrong. I think it’s a gross overreaction, since this might be the quintessential “long tail” movie. There’s an audience (myself included) that completely loves it and will see it multiple times in the theater, then buy it on Blu-Ray. It’s a drag that there’s so much focus on the opening weekend, since it encourages studios to make disposable movies like The Expendables: completely frictionless product that does exactly what it says in the ads, no more and no less, and will be forgotten by the next box office weekend.

But I don’t want to pick on io9 or Cyriaque Lamar, the author of that article — io9 the only Gawker blog I can still stand to read, and looking for trends in pop culture is what they’re supposed to be doing. Plus, their review of the movie is dead-on correct. What I do want to pick on is one of the posts Lamar gives far too much credit to by calling it an “intriguing essay.” It’s a post by blogger Abigail Nussbaum wondering why she enjoyed the movie despite its “misogyny”; it calls the movie “toxic” and says “there is no defense” for it; and it’s just awful. It also spoils pretty much the entire movie, so I only recommend reading it if you’ve already seen the movie.

The “intriguing essay” is exactly the kind of feminism-via-self-righteous-victimization that would justifiably be ignored except for three things: 1) It oversteps its bounds by so recklessly tossing around the word “misogynistic”, assuming that a woman’s interpretation of a movie as offensive to women automatically becomes an unblockable combo move. 2) As evidenced by my last two blog posts, the topics of feminism and Scott Pilgrim have been most on my mind lately, so I found Nussbaum’s post (and her reactions in the comments) particularly offensive. 3) It gives me an excuse to keep talking about and try to better explain what I liked best about the movie.

What’s best about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that it doesn’t try to explain everything. Even after all my complaints about box office being irrelevant, it’s interesting — and, if I’m being honest, a little frustrating — that Inception made more money last weekend, because the two movies are almost complete opposites in that regard. Both have dream sequences and fantastic breaks from reality. But Inception goes out of its way to make sure that absolutely no one is left behind. It has to make sure that everyone in the audience knows exactly what is going on at every second, up until the very last moment, when it finally trusts us enough to leave us with a tiny sliver of ambiguity. And it still has a distressing number of people calling it “mind-blowing.” (To be clear: I liked Inception a lot, I just wish it’d been able to relax and let itself get fantastic).

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World starts out by assuming that everyone in the audience has been alive and conscious in the past 30 years, and that we’re all on board. It doesn’t stop every few minutes to ask the audience, “That was a flashback. Did I just blow your mind?” I can only recall two points in the entire movie where any of the characters even acknowledge that anything particularly weird is happening: once, Scott asks “is this really happening?” and later, he asks the perpetually-cursing Julie Powers “how do you do that thing with your mouth?” In anything else, this would be an example of breaking the fourth wall. But this is a movie that has already shattered the fourth wall by the time the Universal logo has stopped playing. It’s not stepping out of the movie, it’s actually pulling the audience back in. It reminds you that all of the visual effects aren’t just cinematic tics layered on top of the story, they’re an integral part of the world these characters are living in.

That distinction is crucial to understanding why the movie works as more than just visuals an in-jokes. It’s what changes the story from an underdeveloped slacker romance that makes a lot of references to videogames and comic books, to a very sincere love story that’s told in the language of videogames and comic books. It’s also why Nussbaum’s arguments fail, and I’ll pick out a few of the most egregious ones:

The fights between Scott and Ramona’s exes are explicitly described as duels in which Ramona is the prize…

Scott Pilgrim is explicitly shown head-butting a guy so hard he explodes into coins. This is not a movie for people who do not understand metaphor.

The seven evil exes are a metaphor for the baggage that Ramona and Scott are bringing to the start of a new relationship. That is hardly a mind-alteringly insightful observation; it’s said explicitly in the trailer. Several commenters — all of them male, Nussbaum is quick to point out — mention that the entire premise of the movie is a metaphor, but she quotes a different line from the trailer as an attempt at counter-argument: “If you want to be with me, you may have to defeat my seven evil exes.” She insists on a literal interpretation of a line in a movie that defies you to take anything literally.

Even outside of Scott’s self-absorbed point of view, the film’s treatment of its female characters leaves much to be desired. Ramona is a near-blank whose attraction to Scott never really makes sense.

There’s no going “outside of Scott’s self-absorbed point of view,” as that’s the entire movie. The movie assumes that audience will understand the concept of an unreliable narrator, even in a movie without explicit first-person narration.

And this is a story told from Scott Pilgrim’s — not Edgar Wright’s, and presumably not Brian Lee O’Malley’s — viewpoint. Your first clue: the title of the movie. Your second clue: the little title card that pops up saying “Scott Pilgrim Rating: Awesome.” The third clue: everything else. It’s a story told from the viewpoint of a self-absorbed slacker who relates everything to videogames. (Again, this stuff is pretty much all self-evident; I’m not exactly venturing into Cahiers du Cinema territory here).

Ramona is a near-blank because Scott doesn’t understand her. It’s not a case of the movie excising so much of the comic, either — I’ve gotten through four volumes now, and it’s only at the end of the fourth that she progresses past “mysterious.” (Seriously, her character introduction is “Age: Unknown. Is still relatively mysterious.”) She has more lines of dialogue in the comic than in the movie, but it’s mostly the kind of early-20s slacker babble that fills up space in real conversation. And hey, there’s even a line from the comic that’s used in the movie to that effect: “I know you play mysterious and aloof to avoid getting hurt.”

That’s not to say Ramona remains a cipher for the entire movie. We (meaning Scott) get flashes of insight into her character, what she used to be like, all the way from childhood up to right before she came to Canada. It happens six times, in fact. Almost as if these battles against the seven evil exes were a representation of Scott finding out more about Ramona as a person, instead of just as an object of desire or a prize to be won in a videogame. I only wish there were some word to describe when something is used to represent something else without explicitly saying you’re making a comparison….

Finally, Ramona’s behavior in the film’s last act is inexplicably out of character, and turns out to be the result of mind-control, a condition whose significance the film all but ignores and which is resolved with no fanfare whatsoever.

Here, I don’t know whether to be annoyed or sad. I like to think that all of us have been through at least one experience of being so completely, inexplicably infatuated with someone that we do things against our own better judgement. If not, I’d hope at least that the concept isn’t so alien to us that we can’t relate to it. And I’d especially hope that we don’t need to elevate a simile to a metaphor, and explain that being attracted to someone who’s bad for you is only like having a mind control chip implanted in the back of your neck.

The other stuff potentially spoils the end of the movie — it’s not a particularly plot-heavy story, so revealing the ending won’t ruin the movie by any stretch. But the very end is well done, and I was glad I didn’t know what was going to happen. So read on at your own risk.

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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World came out this week for those of us who didn’t catch a preview at Comic-Con or elsewhere. This article on NPR is the best thing you’ll read about it.

I do have a little bit of sympathy for the old people reviewers though, since it’s a movie that constantly makes you question whether you belong in the audience. I mean, I love videogames and comic books, so I’m part of the group, right? But then… I am pushing forty, and if not for arrested development I’d have kids the age of the people in this movie, and I’m not even a little bit Canadian (thank God). Did any young people see me walk into the theater? They’ll know they’ll know!

It even gets worse: I’m not a particularly big fan of the comic book. I only got three volumes in before I had to give up — there was a lot I loved about it, but the rest just kept pushing me away from it. And most damning of all: I’m not a big fan of Edgar Wright’s other stuff, either. I always feel like I should like it more than I do. Spaced was the most frustrating, since it seemed overwhelmingly targeted at me. Directionless videogame-obsessed manchildren; I even had almost all of the music on the soundtrack. But again, every time I’d find myself enjoying it, it’d just take it a step too far, crossing the line from being in on the joke, to trying way too hard.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World definitely isn’t subtle. Or understated. And I think that’s a big part of why it works so well. It’s so gloriously sure of itself that you’re just forced to go along with it or be left behind. There’ve been so many attempts to be The Voice of My Generation that never got it quite right, we basically ended up without one. So I guess we have to hitch a ride on the next generation and borrow theirs.

What killed most of the attempts is that they could never just jump on the spiral of self-awareness without keeping a hand out to steady themselves. There’s always been a sense of people appointing themselves as ambassadors, explaining this nutty world of videogames and comic books to the Normals out there in Real Life. So everything gets buried under layers of reference and parody. For all the people who are complaining that the movie is inaccessible, all they see is a bunch of references to and parodies of stuff they don’t understand, and they’re pissed that the movie doesn’t step out of itself to pull them in.

And that’s pretty much how I felt about the comic book. The movie gets it right by not treating itself as an extended reference. In the scene where Scott meets Roxy Richter, she says something and he asks, “Where’s that from?” Her answer: “From my brain.” On the surface, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a comic book movie slacker love story overloaded with audiovisual references to comics, music, and videogames. What it really is: a love story about people whose entire world is steeped in videogames, comic books, music, movies, and irony. The Zelda music and 1-Ups and pixellated effects aren’t really references any more than I’m making references to English when I write this post. At some point, you’ve got to stop pointing at what a novel sub-culture you’ve created for yourself, and realize that it’s really not that novel anymore.

That doesn’t make them any less impressive: the movie is pretty fantastic throughout, and I was grinning like an idiot the whole time I wasn’t laughing out loud. Just because it’s not constantly, self-consciously saying “look how cool this is” doesn’t mean it’s any less cool. The penultimate fight (with the Katayanagi Twins) is a lot more spectacular than the actual climax, but the ending is still satisfying. All the casting is pretty much perfect. And the part that seemed like the biggest false note in the comic — the extended Dragonball Z/vegan parody — was wisely toned way down for the movie.

This review on the AV Club complains that the movie seems like it should be better than it really is, but that there’s no emotional center to it: it’s buried under irony and special effects. I say that that’s a perfect example of being on the inside looking out and looking back in. The target audience for Scott Pilgrim has always prided itself on being this insular group, extremely self-aware, targeted by Outsiders for their purchasing power. That mentality is so ingrained, that it seems completely foreign to have a movie that tells its story without translating it for anyone else.

He says “the intensity of Scott’s feelings for Ramona are never articulated,” which is absurd. The movie is the most self-evident allegory possible for infatuation and the beginning of a relationship. And characters frequently say exactly what they’re feeling. It just so happens that they all sound sarcastic while they’re saying it. Anybody who’s been on the irony carousel as much as an Onion AV Club writer should get that.

If The Other Guys had stopped about 5 minutes in, it would’ve been the best Funny or Die video ever made. If it’d stopped at about 15 minutes, it would’ve been a great action movie parody. If they’d cut it off around an hour, it’d be a really strong Will Ferrell and Adam McKay comedy. An hour forty, and it’s a definitely-not-their-best-but-one-of-the-better-ones Will Ferrell and Adam McKay comedy.

But at some point — I’m guessing very close to the end of the process — somebody decided that this didn’t have to be just another silly and forgettable movie and could very easily be turned into Relevant Social Commentary. They tacked on a jab at the government bailouts, literally at the last minute, which would have just seemed like another gag that wasn’t quite inflated enough: I was left thinking, “Really? That’s all they’re doing with that whole Anne Heche subplot?” But then over the closing credits, they pounded it home with a series of animated infographics about Ponzi schemes, Bernie Madoff, and the cost of bailing out AIG and others.

The whole movie is built around not knowing when to quit. You can tell they’ve got their own little formula going, making movies based on the idea that if you get Will Ferrell in front of a camera with a bunch of reasonably funny people and a sliver of a concept, you can just let the camera roll and eventually you’ll end up with gold. And it mostly works. Sure, the scenes tend to go on a little bit too long, and there are several you can tell aren’t as funny as they were hoping they’d be, and the movie doesn’t really arc so much as gradually deflate. But there’s nothing that falls absolutely flat, everyone in the cast does a good job with the material, and there are several moments that are really funny.

But it’s not strong enough to outweigh the bad taste left by that ending. It’s like having a pretty good but not outstanding dinner and not finding the hair on the plate until the last few bites. Because these just don’t seem like people who can get away with complaining about excessive spending.

I doubt that Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are pulling in the ludicrous salaries of corporate execs, but I’m pretty sure they don’t work cheap. And the rest of the cast (apart from Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, who pretty much had to be in the movie for it to work at all) aren’t super-expensive A-Listers, but most of them were at one point or another. Even discounting the fact that most of them are probably friends of the filmmakers or people treating it as an extended Funny or Die project, it seemed like kind of a waste of casting money. Throughout I kept thinking, “Did you really need to spring for Anne Heche for such a small part?” Or “Titus Pullo should either have more action scenes or better dialogue.” Or even “That’s the woman from all that stuff whose name I can never remember. She should have more than four lines.”

What’s weird is that I never think about that kind of thing during movies. But all through this one, even before the ending, I kept going into producer mode, thinking how expensive everything must’ve been. There are at least fifty demolished cars, and at most five of them were needed for a punchline. (No seriously: they have a Prius drive over the tops of two other cars after a gag is over, just to show it driving away). At least one helicopter explodes, and I don’t have any idea many real-world helicopters that ends up being. Multiple buildings and storefronts are blown up or demolished. Scenes are filmed in penthouses and soon-to-be-demolished offices which can’t be cheap. I had a dollar-to-joke-payoff counter running through my head the whole time, and after the first thirty minutes or so, it wasn’t giving a very good return on investment.

But even with all that, they didn’t know when to quit. After all, being expensive isn’t the same thing as being evil, and I’ve got little doubt the movie will end up making money, even without the product placement money from Bed Bath and Beyond. (And Toyota, assuming all the exposure for the Prius outweighed having characters compare it to a vagina). I got about ten bucks’ worth of entertainment out of it, the theaters were pretty full so no doubt the investors will make their money back, everybody wins. It’d be hard to equate even an over-budgeted movie with large-scale corporate corruption.

Except the little infographics at the end tried to put a populist spin on everything. They had a little chart showing how everyone’s 401(k) is worth half as much as it was before the sub-prime mortgage collapse. And a little elevator showing the increasing pay disparity between corporate CEOs and regular employees. And a businessman on a hammock with a big number over his head showing how much CEOs of failed companies made in bonuses.

And that’s where they lost me. Because I couldn’t help but take a couple zeroes off that number and reckon that that’s how much Will Ferrell or Mark Wahlberg have made for a couple of movies. Or that just one of those scenes with a gag that didn’t quite pay off probably cost as much as I’ll make in two years of working. Or that some guys made millions from running their companies into the ground, and other guys are making millions by making repeated jokes about TLC in 2010. Either way, they’re seeing a lot more money than I am. And that’s not exactly something you want to be drawing attention to.

I guess in the end, I would’ve rather seen a movie about the first guys. Because every second of Samuel Jackson and The Rock going over the top was worth every smashed car, bus, and facade of the Trump Tower it took to make it.