I've seen The World's End.
It turns out that midday matinees are about as popular as I remember them to be. No, seriously; because normal people have jobs and responsibilities and whatnot, I think I could have counted the number of people in the cinema on my two hands, maybe using a foot for the difficult calculations.
This is how I like it. I'm an antisocial bastard, but it's a simple equation; the more people in a cinema, the more chances there are that someone will do something irritating. (Smartphone users, I'm looking at you.)
I went in expecting not to really like the film. I went in out of misplaced loyalty because I loved Shaun of the Dead and liked Hot Fuzz. But something felt... I don't know, 'off' about things; is it Simon Pegg's meteoric - and quite possibly well-deserved - rise to A-list stardom? Ditto Edgar Wright, although Scott Pilgrim was not universally loved at the box office? When I say 'off', I mean that it's strange to see this reunion given the increase in wattage of at least two thirds of the trifecta - and Nick Frost hasn't exactly been too shabby, either.
So you have this group of on-the-ups high wattage people reuniting to do what is, in essence, something in the same thread as Shaun of the Dead, except with a bigger budget - although I can't justify that factually, as my web-fu is failing me, but it's probably not an unfounded assumption.
It would be so easy for the elements not to mesh, or for something to feel out of place.
I was surprised - pleasantly - to actually enjoy the film. It's chasing the same buzz of something weirdly cool, truly, trying to feel the same kind of epic that Shaun of the Dead did in sliding from romantic comedy to zombie film in a single seamless tonal shift; in this case, it's reunion comedy shifting to alien invasion, and it's actually arguably more seamlessly done than Shaun; it just sort of happens, without any particular warning.
The pacing felt a little weird now and then until I realised it was driven entirely by the central character's obsessive needs, and then it made sense. The dialogue, too, is just crackly with sounding like how people actually talk to each other, especially people who were close a long time ago but haven't seen each other; the past is still there, and they still have the same kind of underlying 'love' for each other, and it takes so little for them to just access that kind of thing and start bickering and sniping and back-and-forthing; it's delightful dialogue, in a nutshell.
It's also kind of refreshing to see that, at some point, Nick Frost asked not to be the Comic Relief, delegating the role entirely to Pegg; Frost is kind of revelatory as 'just a normal bloke badly irritated with the alien invasion'. He's serious, he doesn't really take any shit; he's Not Ed/Danny, in other words. Which is nice.
One thing, though, and judge this for yourself; for me, the epilogue was completely unnecessary. God knows I'm no director, or decent writer, or in any major position to comment - I'm just someone on a desert island, throwing little blog posts out in bottles that occasionally people see - but the ending/epilogue/explanation was kind of... Odd.
After THE BIG THING HAPPENS, there's this long-ish explanation of what happened next. It looks, in point of fact, like it was relatively expensive to film and ups the production values and feels, to me, pointless; after THE BIG THING HAPPENS, I expected a breather moment, a quip, then credits - and maybe in the credits, vignettes of post BIG THING life.
Instead, epilogue.
Oh well. Maybe I'm just missing the true relevance of Explaining What Happened Next...
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