Troll (2022)

Once upon a time, there was a movie called Trollhunter, which was a clever;y done faux-documentary about trolls and their folklore, viewed as a type of rare, but potentially dangerous, species that needed careful knowledge and technique to handle.

Troll is not at all like that, going for more of the blockbuster, "monster on the loose", style movie. In the pursuit of progress, humans awaken something they shouldn't. Military powerless. Only hope small band of people willing to embrace the weird and thinking outside the box. You know the deal.

The team that saves the day is a paleontologist, her troll-lore obsessed loony of a dad, a Prime Minister's aide, and one soldier that's willing to listen. The aide is writing a book about a monk who can pull of his own head and throw it at people (so he can bite them), in what is apparently a representation of the power of spirituality over the material world, or something like that. I'm not sure what that had to do with the larger plot, maybe just to establish him as kind of an odd guy, but it came up at least twice, so now you get to know about it.

While both the Prime Minister and the stereotypical general with lots of ribbons on his chest are skeptical, there's this one guy in particular that actively scoffs at everything the paleontologist suggests. She points out the aerial view clearly shows giant footprints? He scoffs. She describes the 200-foot tall creature, made of earth and stone, with a long tail and a tuft of hair at the end a troll? He scoffs. What exactly he thinks it is, I don't know. He's there to be wrong and loud and generally fuck everything up. At least he eventually gets punched in the face.

The only gets into bits and pieces of troll folklore. There are too many scenes of people sitting around long tables in underground bunkers arguing for that. The bit about Christian blood comes up once, when it eats a guy. Something to do with bells driving them away. The sunlight turning them to stone factors prominently, as our heroes try to jerry-rig a workaround as Norway doesn't get much direct sun, apparently.

The ending has a chase sequence through a deserted Oslo (deserted for in-story reasons), and the heroes trying to stop the troll before the military unleashes some super-missile to kill the troll. I assume nuclear, although they're never come out and say that. So it's the ticking clock of the heroes trying to set up their plan while one helpful soldier tries to interrupt the missile launch via hacking. It seems odd that you could hack a fighter jet so it can't launch a missile attached to it, from an underground bunker.