There's trouble pretty quickly. One of the bars (with the word "cock" in its name) tosses the brew crew because King is banned there for life after a brawl twenty years ago. I didn't know that bars could have such long memories.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
"The World's End": British horror comedy combines "Judas Kiss" with "Body Snatchers", "Terminator", and "Revolution"; King just wants to scream "I'm free!"
Oh, you’re not supposed to take a wacky apocalyptic British
comedy “The World’s End”, by Edgar
Wright, too seriously. But there real is
a lot going on here, to relate to other films, and to serious warnings.
In the beginning, in 1990, five friends, just too young for chest hair, ready
to leave prep school, get initiated with a pub crawl in Newton’s Haven, a
wonderful little highlands town that looks like a Shakespeare set (with cars
and modernity). Something bizarre
happened at the last pub, the source of the movie’s name.
Twenty some years later, the men get together for the ritual
again. Twenty years has aged them. The ring leader is Gary King (writer Simon
Pegg) who constantly says “I want to be free to do what I want to do.” One of the friends is a teetotaler.
There's trouble pretty quickly. One of the bars (with the word "cock" in its name) tosses the brew crew because King is banned there for life after a brawl twenty years ago. I didn't know that bars could have such long memories.
There's trouble pretty quickly. One of the bars (with the word "cock" in its name) tosses the brew crew because King is banned there for life after a brawl twenty years ago. I didn't know that bars could have such long memories.
Things get wild forty minutes into the film, with a restroom
encounter with a young man who looks a bit like one of the men twenty years
ago. My immediate thought is, “Judas
Kiss” (June 4, 2011 here). But that is
not to be. There is no love for younger
selves. Soon the five find themselves in
slapstick battles with robots (not exactly zombies) whose heads come off
without stopping them. Oh, the cyborgs are made of smart material that regenerates
itself. Their synthetic blood (good for
transfusions maybe) is blue.
At the last pub, the friends are challenged, and can
contemplate the idea of having their old younger bodies, albeit as robots with
their memories. Okay, that’s a rip-off
of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Really, wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake
up tomorrow morning and have my body as it was at, say, age 21? Some of the friends could use a
makeover; Steve has just a mid-chest
tattoo (no hair, still), and one of the other guy’s legs is severely
scarred. The script makes something of
physical decline (“tissue death” as Dr.
Phil calls it) and a desire to reverse it.
The stakes are even higher.
First, it seems that all they need to go is get out of town. But the rest of the world will not be all
right, either. Say the concept is a bit like
the NBC series “Revolution”, except that the physical destruction is
manifest. Electricity will go away, and
so will the Internet. But the friends
will be able to teach others to live simply.
A Mick Jagger song “I’m free” is one of the many
included. See my review of a short film
by that name May 13, 2013 here. The
pieces all fit.
The website from Focus Features is here. There is even a quiz!
I saw the film at the AMC Courthouse in Arlington, in the
reclining lounge chairs, and although the auditorium is smaller (84 seats), it
nearly sold out even on a weeknight. The
digital presentation (2.35:1) is crisp.
This film could have used 3-D. The
music score by Steven Price often paraphrases some music from one of the
Shostakovich symphonies (I think the 8th), a duple-time march.
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