MOVIE SYNOPSIS
20 years after attempting an epic pub crawl, five childhood friends reunite when one of them becomes hell bent on trying the drinking marathon again. They are convinced to stage an encore by mate Gary King, a 40-year old man trapped at the cigarette end of his teens, who drags his reluctant pals to their home town and once again attempts to reach the fabled pub, The World’s End. As they attempt to reconcile the past and present, they realize the real struggle is for the future, not just theirs but humankind’s. Reaching The World’s End is the least of their worries. (source: screenrant.com)
Isn’t nostalgia a wonderful thing?
It casts the past in such a flattering light that our present seems dim and tawdry by comparison, and we wonder if maybe, just maybe, a trip back to from whence we came via memory lane might be the ticket for what currently ails us.
Slapping on a our rose-tinted glasses, and packing our regrets of which we have many, we do our best to recreate the past with often mixed results.
In the case of Gary King (Simon Pegg) rushing back to embrace the past is about all he has left and he goes out all to convince his four reluctant friends, all of whom have well and truly moved into the sedate arms of adulthood (unlike perpetual teenager Gary), to go one last epic pub crawl.
But a disappointing recreation of a seminal event in their younger years is the least of their worries when they discover that the patrons of the pubs they visit are not who they once were …
And replete with glowing eyes and zombie gait, they seem hellbent on bringing down humanity starting with the five old friends.
The final film in the Edgar Wright-directed/Pegg and Wright-scripted Three Flavours Cornetto/Blood and Ice Cream trilogy, so named because they all feature one of the characters purchase an appropriately-coloured Cornetto ice cream, World’s End is an apocalypse film with an hilarious difference.
Starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who have also starred in the previous two films in the series, Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), as well as Martin Freeman, Eddia Marsan, Patty Considine and Rosamund Pike, the film looks like an impressively funny mix of the world ending, and friends wondering if you can truly recreate the past (which if they prove unsuccessful at stopping the ghouls may be all they have left).
* The film will premiere in New Zealand on 18 July – it’s not clear though if this will be a world premiere as such – with the UK following on 19 July, USA on 23 August, and Australia on 3 October.