Norwegian director Roar Uthaug points the way in Netflix’s ‘Troll.’ Courtesy of Netflix © 2022. Click to view the trailer.
Troll is not a complete disaster of a movie but quite close to it.
Firstly, it makes no sense that the most likable character, Tobias Tibermann (Gard B. Eldsvold), the semi-mad father of one of the protagonists, Nora (Ine Marie Willman), gets whacked just when the plot seems to take off.
Nora is a paleontologist who stopped believing in the supernatural after “growing up,” as she explains in one of the sequences.
Now, nonetheless, she and the Norwegian government are facing an enemy unseen in the present times: the troll. The colorful bunch of decision-makers does not recall hearing of the King Kong lookalike in the past thousand years or so. And if they would have, these folks are not the kind to believe in fairytales.
The troll, however, becomes very real when it destroys half a house in some rural area before leaping toward the capital, Oslo. What could the government do to stop it? Could they nuke the troll and turn the capital into ruins?
The Norwegian director, Roar Uthaug, is known for really good suspense-setters such as The Wave (2015) where an 85-meter-high violent tsunami threatens to devastate Norway.
This time the threat is a 50-meter creature made of sand and rock.
And while nobody is trying to reinvent the wheel here, the lackluster dialogue, the characters and the story imply that this substandard mess was completed for one thing only: money.
The question, nonetheless, is: will it bring in any, and at what cost?
Running time: 101 minutes. Troll premieres on Netflix December 1.
