Film: The World’s End

Finally got the third Cornetto trilogy film by Wright/Pegg/Frost on DVD and watched it. I was intrigued as to how they’d play it, and how they managed to work in the main character in full on Goth mode with a Sisters of Mercy t-shirt, which ironically I had bought shortly before the film was launched.

Spoiler Alert !

It’s a pub crawl where they realise that all but one of them has moved on from their teenage heyday, and that botht they and their homw town have changed.

On my first watch, I thoroughly enjoyed it up to the ending and the argument between the heroes and The Network. I found it funny that they’d managed to cast another ex James Bond as a villian, and Pierce Brosnan did it well. I’d never noticed Eddie Marsan in anything I’ve watched but he played the haplass Peter well, and Paddy Considine (seen in Hot Fuzz as one of the Andys) was really good.

However, knowing that these guys produce multi-layered films that really bear repeat watching, and seeing as I had a mountain of ironing following the washing machine being reinstated, I watched it again. And again. And then I watched the bonus extras. (And yes, the Sisters t-shirt was in the ironing pile !)

It all fits together.

Whereas Shaun of the Dead is an immediate winner, The World’s End is a slow burner that really comes together.

The final puzzle I didn’t spot until the third viewing was the Cornetto joke – the one convenience food Andy would miss.

Best of all, as well as the Sister t-shirt, they used This Corrosion several times and surprisingly it is on the film sound track CD, something that the Sisters have long resisted:

And when we first started to sort of devise [young Gary’s] look, we had to go to [Sisters frontman] Andrew Eldritch and his marketing team and ask if it was okay. And we heard that, you know, he was actually a fan of our stuff. So it was an absolute treat to hear from my hero.

And…

Simon Pegg: I was very much a goth from sixteen to twenty-one. The big names for me at the time, The Sisters Of Mercy, obviously, were around, Bauhaus, The Cure, The March Violets, that kind of deal.

Though I’ll have to forgive him on the The Cure.

So after a couple of times seeing it I think its a great film. Now I’m going to have to go back, watch all of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz again. Its a hard life….