After watching the trailer, you think that you get a real sense of what I Kill Giants is all about. However, I can tell you with total confidence that you’d be wrong. Way wrong.
I Kill Giants is based on the graphic novel of the same name and follows Barbara Thorson (Madison Wolfe), a young girl bequeathed with the burden of protecting her town from giants. Barbara is the only one who sees these mammoth beasts, and she is the only one who knows of their desire to obliterate all human life.
Justifiably disliked for her quirky tendencies and unkind slurs, Barbara doesn’t make friends easily. The only one she has is Sophia (Sydney Wade), a generic character whose family have recently emigrated to the US from England. Though Barbara sets the traps and fights the giants on her own, Sophia steps up to the plate now and again for fruitless tasks such as creating protective circles and being afraid.
Zoe Saldana’s performance as Mrs. Mollé, the new school counsellor, is disappointing. Her character is supposed to show strength but only reveals weakness coupled with an incapacity to help when help is clearly what is needed. The only character that has any real depth is Karen (Imogen Poots), Barbara’s adult sister, as we follow her struggle to be a surrogate mother to her younger siblings. Perhaps kudos is owed to the performance given by Poots herself as hers was the only one I was able to relate to.
I Kill Giants sees Barbara bullied by her peers and lost in what may or may not be her own imagination, fighting giants in earnest and getting no credit for it. The plot twist that helps us to understand why she is the way she is doesn’t become apparent until very near the end of the film, and it definitely needn’t have been kept hidden for so long. Contrary to popular belief, and to the frustrating effort of director Anders Walter to keep us duped throughout, I Kill Giants is not a sci-fi about fighting giants but rather a child’s refusal to accept the concept of death.
This film had real potential to be something incredible, but with its childlike writing and poor acting, it has sadly fallen far, far short of the mark.
Fun Fact:
Halle Berry was considered for the part of Mrs. Mollé. However, she wasn’t considered bankable enough to star in the film.
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