Troll 2

The Weight of the Moss

Sequels to giant-monster movies tend to obey one basic law: if the first film had one enormous creature, the second better cough up another so the audience can watch them trade blows. The MonsterVerse has been dining out on that logic for years, turning urban destruction into a kind of competitive event. *Troll 2* follows the same path. Roar Uthaug brings us back to a Norway still rattled by its first run-in with a walking mountain, and three years after the original became an unlikely global hit, he scales everything up in a way that feels much closer to polished franchise filmmaking. It's undeniably bigger. I'm just not convinced bigger helps it.



When we meet Nora Tidemann again, she's holed up in a remote cabin under heavy snow, looking more and more like the folklore-obsessed hermit her father used to be. Ine Marie Wilmann keeps Nora grounded by playing her as a woman permanently braced for bad news. Watch what happens to her shoulders when government adviser Andreas (Kim Falck) arrives—she never quite unclenches, as if she knows civilization is held together by thinner thread than everyone else does. Falck remains useful comic ballast, especially when the military types start thundering around and he mostly responds by looking appropriately terrified. The movie needs that human scale once it descends into a subterranean holding complex beneath the Vemork power station, a frozen bunker that feels imported from *Transformers*.



At its best, the craft here is impressive. Uthaug still understands texture and scale better than a lot of directors working in this sandbox. The after-ski nightclub attack is the standout. A newly awakened troll peels the roof off the building like it's opening a tin can, and the crack of wood and metal has a nasty, convincing weight to it. Even the creature's voice sounds less like an animal cry than tectonic plates grinding together. It's exhilarating stuff. The problem is the script keeps getting sidetracked by an Indiana Jones-ish hunt through history involving King Olaf and Norway's Christianization. Your tolerance for exposition dressed up as legend will decide how much that bothers you. As the critic from *What The Craggus Saw* put it, the movie "traded the eerie, moss-covered atmosphere of its predecessor for the polished, kinetic language of the American franchise blockbuster."



Eventually the film delivers the promised Trondheim showdown between the hostile troll and a second giant with more sympathetic shading. The effects are slick, the CG muscle and fur sitting nicely against the severe Norwegian landscape. But the ending rushes past the melancholy that made the first movie stick. Once you start making an unknowable force of nature more legible, you also make it smaller. *Troll 2* is an entertaining piece of popcorn engineering, no question. I just missed the damp, eerie soul of the first one.