How "I Kill Giants" Gets Fantasy Wrong
/Quick Fox: D+
If you read the graphic novel of I Kill Giants, you will hate the film adaptation because the amount of wasted potential is maddening. Otherwise, it’s a decent coming of age story about confronting death.
winding dragon
I Kill Giants (2017) is a low-fantasy melodrama based on the popular graphic novel by writer Joe Kelly and artist J. M. Ken Niimura. The story has two mirroring plot lines centered on Barbara Thorson (Madison Wolfe), an unapologetically bold teenager who wears a pair of headband bunny ears and carries a heart-shaped purse with the name “Coveleski” sewn into the cover. Barbara doesn’t have time for friends or family — she is the self-appointed chosen one, on a quest to save her small coastal town from a fearsome giant on a warpath. Although nobody else can see the monsters closing in on her town, Barbara is adamant that she is the only line of defense against certain death.
Meanwhile, as Barbara trains for battle, the people close to her are concerned for Barbara’s apparent descent into hallucinatory madness. Barbara’s sister Karen (Imogen Pootsas) is barely keeping her head above water — working overtime to support her younger brother and sister means she isn’t around enough to notice Barbara sneaking off for dangerous nighttime excursions. The school counselor Mrs. Mollé (Zoe Saldana) tries to extend a helping hand beyond Barbara’s emotional barriers, uncovering deeper truths about why Barbara mouths off to teachers and picks fights with the school bully Taylor (Rory Jackson). Sophia (Sydney Wade), a transfer student from England, attempts to befriend Barbara but is frightened by Barbara’s insistence to go looking for trouble. As the story develops, we slowly realize that these two plot arcs are connected by a single truth: Barbara’s mother is dying.
Joe Kelly and J.M. Ken Niimura’s graphic novel
I read Joe Kelly and J. M. Ken Niimura’s graphic novel this past year, and was really excited to see how the film (directed by Anders Walter and also written by Joe Kelly) adapted it. Adaptation has always been tricky, because the production has to balance garnering favor from the original fan base while attracting new audiences. Fantasy is put in an especially difficult position, because there’s an additional layer of explaining the fantasty universe to new audiences without boring people who are already familiar with the story. And it’s really easy to do poorly but extraordinarily hard to do right.
Imagine if Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone began with Harry Potter waking up in the cupboard or, as the book does, with Mr. Dursley going about his mundane daily morning commute. It loses something. We need the mystery and magic of Dumbledore using the deluminator to extinguish streetlamps; Professor McGonagall morphing from cat to witch; Hagrid zooming in on his motorbike — it establishes the tone for, arguably, the entire series, while rewarding the literary faithful and intriguing new audiences.
I bring up these conceptual idea about the role of fantasy in film because it’s important to have that context when I say this: I Kill Giants fails fantasy. An adaptation doesn’t have to tell the same exact story as its source material. It doesn’t have to devote the same amount of time to minor characters. Its doesn’t have to give a damn about leaving Easter eggs for its fans. But if an adaptation wants to succeed, it needs to have an understanding of what made the original source material special.
The charm of Kelly and Niimura’s graphic novel is that it’s witty, dynamic, meditative, insightful, funny…all while telling an emotional story of a young girl who doesn’t know how to cope with her mother’s death. The graphic novel places Barbara Thorson in her own private world — sparkling fairies everywhere, minuscule garden soldiers gathering food, giants lurking around any corner...the looming, palpable threat of the boss giant destroying her hometown. When Barbara tells Sophia that inside her heart-shaped purse contains “Coveleski,” a mighty war hammer named after the famous Philadelphia Phillies pitcher who once beat the New York Giants in three games over the span of five days, earning him the nickname “The Giant Killer,” it doesn’t feel like the ravings of a delusional middle-schooler on the verge of mental collapse. It’s exciting and full of wonder. In the graphic novel Barbara is witty and arrogant; she walks with a swagger and laughs in the face of danger. Fighting giants fills her with joy and purpose — it doesn’t matter whether or not the fantasy element of Barbara’s life is real or not because as the reader, I want it to be real.
That’s what is attractive about the original story. Barbara’s world. It’s Barbara’s life; it’s Barbara’s struggle — the fantasy world is a given and not a question. But the movie constantly undermines Barbara’s mental state, and it absolutely kills the tone of the story. Outside of a few sporadic moments of dark energy and glimpses of giants, Barbara does not interact with any fantasy creatures until the boss battle. We see her preparing to battle monsters — spreading jam on a tree or forcing Sophia to participate in a slightly cultish finger-pricking blood-letting ceremony — but it’s not the same as seeing the magic happen. This is hugely problematic because everyone — her sister, her counselor, her best friend — keeps trying to convince her that the fantasy world is not real. Instead of siding with Barbara like we do in the graphic novel, we are forced to accept their position that the giants are Barbara’s imagination due to the absence of magic.
The counter to that is to say, wait — isn’t the absence of fantastical elements supporting the message that people shouldn’t use escapism to confront serious issues like death? Well...no. The issue isn’t that Barbara is escaping into her own world; the problem is that Barbara is correlating defeating the boss giant with somehow preventing her mother from dying. One of the running themes in the fantasy genre is using a magical spell or performing a heroic act that will save someone else’s life. I Kill Giants is a subversion on this idea — the more involved we are in Barbara’s fantasy world, the more the audience is supposed to believe that Barbara’s obsession with slaying the giant will actually save her mother. It’s flawed logic for the real world, but in a fantasy universe, completely within the realm of possibility.
Why the absence of fantastical elements is destructive for this film’s message is because we never believe the fantasy world is real; the entire time the audience is led to believe that Barbara’s on a mission doomed to fail. We know there’s no hope for her mother, which lowers the tension for the climactic battle with the boss giant. When the boss giants allows Barbara to defeat him and explains to her that from the beginning his only objective was to expose the flaw in her logic so that she can move past her grief, we are supposed to have the same realization that Barbara does: some problems in life can’t be fixed. Except it’s a lesson we inherently understood 30 minutes into the movie when the only sign of a giant was a tree that moved suspiciously for five seconds.
I Kill Giants is an incredible disappointment because it’s so close to being a good film. The cast is solid — Zoe Saldana shines in her role as the school counselor, and when Madison Wolfe is given something actually playable to work with (for the first hour, the only thing she did was scowl and mutter rebellious phrases, which is more of a reflection on the director), she shows her emotional range. The message is powerful, the conceit is unique, and when we actually do see magic, the visual effects are pretty impressive. But the treatment of fantasy is maddening because it demonstrates a complete lack of awareness of why people wanted to see the film in the first place and mishandles how fantasy should be used to support its message rather than detract from it.
I admit, perhaps my bias of reading the graphic novel means it’s impossible for me to fully appreciate the film as a separate piece, but what I can safely say is that I Kill Giants mistreated the audience. It didn’t trust the audience to implicitly understand that fantasy isn’t the emotional heart of the story, that it’s a child’s fear of death, and instead ripped the magic out of the story altogether. If you have the time and money, go buy the graphic novel at your local comic book store because the graphic novel and the film are two completely different narratives that actually seem to conflict with each other. You’ll know which version is better after you read it yourself.