European cinema has always been head and shoulders above Hollywood — not surprising, when even the former’s giant monster films are better than the latter’s; and by ‘better,’ I mean much more pleasant to look at and a lot shorter. Oh, and smarter, too; Troll’s titular creature is of course fictional, but its well-documented Nordic folklore background lends it a solid legitimacy that we won’t find in, say, Godzilla or King Kong, whose latest iterations find their origin in the Hollow Earth. Once again, the European film draws from age-old mythology, while the Hollywood flick resorts to a crackpot belief.
The titular troll is pretty good-looking, even for a CGI creation. It helps that there’s nothing to compare it to; we all know what a gorilla, gigantic or regular-sized, is supposed to look like, and the MonsterVerse (what a dumb fucking name) version of Kong ain’t it (the stop-motion and guy-in-a-suit renditions get a pass). Same for Godzilla, who for all intents and purposes is a glorified lizard. On the other hand, who’s to say what a troll’s appearance should be like? Ironically, the mythical being is, not more realistic — because after all a troll can’t be any more realistic than a 300-foot tall ape —, but certainly more real than the one based on a real-life animal.
I think that applies to this Norwegian movie’s aesthetic as a whole; it’s not good CGI because there’s no such thing as good CGI (there is the extremely rare seamless CGI and the slightly less rare thematically appropriate CGI — neither of which is superior to practical SFX —, but Troll falls short of those too), but it definitely belongs in the comparatively not-as-bad CGI category, putting to shame most 21st century American blockbusters.
The plot, however, is another story — or rather, the same story. Disappeared Dad/Cassandra Truth? Check. The Military is Useless? Check. Arbitrary Skepticism? Check. Rousing Speech? Check. Big action set pieces (admittedly very well excuted) in which things get blowed up real good? Check. And so on and so forth. It’s as formulaic as it gets, but that’s where the Scandinavian-relevant premise comes in to save the day. According to the film, trolls “died off” as a consequence of “the Christianization of Norway;” moreover, “Old myths make reference to trolls throwing boulders at churches because they hated the sound of the bells.”
If you’re familiar with the history of the Norwegian black metal scene, you’ll have no difficulty identifying the parallelism with the wave of church burnings that took place in Norway in the early-to-mid 90s (incidentally, Finnish black metal band Fintroll’s song lyrics revolve mostly around a fictional troll-king fighting the Christians who enter his lands). This is the kind of subtle social commentary that’s sorely lacking in most if not all VFX extravaganzas. To top it all off, Troll exhibits a healthy, silly sense of humor (for instance, when we find out that the Queen of Norway’s favorite car is an unsightly yellow pick-up truck).
90% of Everything is Crap 