Summer blockbuster season is over, thankfully. It was rather disappointing for fans. Man of Steel gave us two hours of CGI fighting smothering 15 minutes of an attempt at a story. Star Trek: Into Darkness was so full of naive and contradictory notions of human goodness that my husband almost made us leave the theater for my eye rolling and snorting. (I’ve never been a Trekkie, but that was ridiculous.) And those were the movies that were monetarily successful. The rest of the intended blockbusters failed decisively.
But as the summer movie season ended, it produced a little gem of a movie. Relatively few watched it. More should.
As movie buffs have noted time and time again, Hollywood tries to push themes too hard. They make morals of the story overt. Then the movie comes off as preachy. Conservatives making movies tend to make this mistake with vigor, figuring among other things that they have only one shot to get the idea across so they better feature it.
The World’s End avoids that mistake (probably because it didn’t come out of Hollywood). It hits themes of friendship, loneliness, despair, aging, the necessity of free will–all and more in a story about a pub crawl. Well, not just a pub crawl. It’s a Dusk ’till Dawn like pub crawl, only set in small town England with blue-blooded robots sent by interventionist aliens. Throw in some 80’s rock and Shakespearian speeches about beer, and I grant it isn’t for everyone.
But for those of you I had at Dusk ’till Dawn set in English pubs, see the movie tonight. If it has already stooped showing, watch for it on Netflix. I’m going to catch it again then because some of those speeches are worthy of memorization and inclusion into the pop culture canon.
“Good food. Fine Ales. Total annihilation.”
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