The World's End

And the world was no more.  The apocalypse came and all we know and love was reduced to ash and smoldering ruin...  But I'm not here to discuss the fan reaction to Ben Affleck being cast as Batman, this is a review about Edgar Wright's latest flick (and 3rd in the "Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy") The World's End.  While the Batman announcement generated enough publicity and created a hashmark surplus large enough to shade and texture the Japanese Manga industry for two centuries, Wright, Pegg, Frost, and the rest of the usual suspects put out yet another ridiculously entertaining movie.

Pegg takes on the role Gary King, 12-step Escapee and lead instigator to a group of five formerly hard-drinking, hard-partying British youths, now all grown up with careers and wives, etc. aside for Gary, who remains obsessed with (among other things) completing a 12-pub challenge that he failed so many years ago.  A time when bands like Depeche Mode, The Pixies, Sonic Youth, and Janes Addiction were all the rage.  (Holy crap, just rattling those bands off makes me kind of nostalgic for the early 90's.)

Gary is an annoying alcoholic who still manages to convince his mature friends to reluctantly head back to their hometown and make one final attempt at the epic pub crawl known as "the Golden Mile".  The performance is very good and a nice change from the previous two movies where Frost was the one playing Id to Pegg's more responsible characters.  It's a good thing he can keep your attention and only be borderline too annoying, because the film for about forty minutes has nothing to do with robots or aliens.  I almost feel like I should tag that as a spoiler, because if you came into this movie knowing nothing about it (or Wright and Pegg's film making history together), you'd think this was one of those charming English Comedies like the The Full Monty, Billy Elliot, or when Jeremy Clarkson beat up Piers Morgan.

But yes, a little more than a third into the movie, things get more than a little out of hand as they tend to do in Edgar Wright movies (and real-life pub crawls).  There's an alien invasion, replicants, well-choreographed fight scenes that get more outrageous as the characters build up Super Saiyan levels of Dutch Courage with every pint consumed.  Throughout it all, they actually manage to keep a hold on the human elements, something that sometimes goes missing in the big action "blockbuster" movies when it becomes about how many CG buildings the FX house can annihilate.  There's a strange anti nanny-state message throughout that I didn't expect, but totally dig because with all the government spying stuff in the news nowadays, (Hi NSA, if you're reading this, please click on my Amazon Affiliate links!) a lot of people seem pretty concerned about being free...  To do what they want...  Any old time.

Pacific Rim

First off, today I learned that Jaegermeister means "Master Hunter".  Actually, I knew a Meister was a master of something, but in the opening seconds of Pacific Rim, they define "Jaeger" as meaning "Hunter".  It connected the dots for me.  That has nothing to do with this movie review post.

Secondly, Pacific Rim is easily the most enjoyable thing I've seen on screen this summer. It might have something to do with being an 80's/90's kid who grew up watching Voltron, Robotech and the like, but judging from the reactions of the younger set in the theater, they were having a damn good a time watching giant robots throw down with giant inter-dimensional alien beasts for 2+ hours too.  I suppose when all you've had in this genre the past few years was seen via a shaky, indestructible camcorder or involved Shia Labeouf saying "no" a lot, this was quite the treat.

The plot, if for some reason you were concerned with such things, is that monstrous Kaiju are coming to earth via a rift in the pacific ocean, wreaking havoc on mankind, and being total dicks to everyone they can get their semi-truck size claws on.  They're each about the size of skyscraper and are really pissed off all the time.  Humanity's (awesome) response to this threat is to build equally monstrous robots called Jaegers operated by two pilots who act as left and right brain lobes within the mechanical behemoth's skull.

It's pretty much a given that anything directed by Guillermo Del Toro will have a vast array of cool beasts and characters to look at, and he doesn't hold back here.  In the blue corner, the Jaegers have cool names like "Gipsy Danger", "Cherno-Alpha", and "Striker Eureka", while their opponents in the red corner bear names like "Knife Head", "Trespasser" and "Leatherback".  The level of detail and care put into designing these things, like everything else in the movie, is top notch, and they managed to give them individual identity without resorting to racist automobiles (I'm going to lay off the Transformers franchise now).

I saw the movie in IMAX 3D, which was worth the extra couple of bucks, even though it literally puts money in George Lucas's already fat wallet and I can see some people feeling a little bit like the early Jaeger pilots in some spots.  Seriously, my eyes were watering from the insane level of stuff flying around during the battle scenes.  There might have been blood coming out of my eyes.  It was pretty rad.  I theorize Del Toro wanted to make the audience get the full experience of being inside a massive robot that's linked to your brain and the brain of your co-pilot while a twenty-five-story Komodo Dragon is bitch slapping you with its tail.

In short.  This was just all out fun.  Strap in and cast off the chains of moody, introspective superheroes for a little while. Keep an eye out for homages to previous giant monster/robot films like Godzilla (and I swear the quick arm motions in one scene were straight out of Power Rangers).  Speaking of which, I've heard there's an upcoming Godzilla movie...  We'll see.