THE WORLD'S END

Few comedies are awaited with as much fervor as those of Edgar Wright who, along with frequent star and co-writer Simon Pegg seem to be vying for the title of "patron saint of Nerddom." While Wright's films, particularly those of the Cornetto Trilogy, are draped in nostalgia and genre thrills, they are unique in modern geekdom in that they don't rest on nostalgia so much as they serve as complex, enjoyably conflicted, frequently hilarious meditations on it.

It's hard growing up, particularly if you've been putting it off for a few decades. Such is the predicament of Gary King (Pegg), the rude, drunken and earnestly desperate protagonist of The World's End, the third and possibly best entry of the trilogy. For King, life never measurably improved on a drunken pub crawl he attempted with his friends when they were all 17.

Twenty-three years later King is suddenly eager to get the band back together and recreate that crawl, which he dubs "The Golden Mile:" 12 pints at all 12 of the pubs in their hometown of Newton Heaven, finishing at the titular World's End. But his friends (played by Wright regulars: Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Eddie Marsan) aren't so eager to join him. Unlike King, who lives his life in a shabby flat doing God-only-knows between AA meetings, they've all settled down and joined society. But one by one they're lured back by King's oily charm and the promise of days gone by.

But recapturing their glory days proves difficult, everything seems just out of reach and they can't settle in like they used to. The town feels slightly off, particularly the all important pubs which have lost their individual flair after a series of corporate take-overs: "Starbucking," they call it. There's a nice, quintessentially Wrightian touch, where every time they enter a new bar, the camera repeats the exact same establishing shot in what is clearly the same set with different extras. This persistent offness launches the gang into existential crisis mode. It's as if the world is against them cutting loose. Of course, this being a Cornetto film, the assertion is soon proven true when we learn that the town's increasing plainness is actually the result of a stealth takeover by space robots. 

This film might be the most confident of the series. We get no winking shots of flying saucers or anything to telegraph the genre shift a la Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. As much fun as that was in the previous installments, it's for the best that we don't get it here, as the importance of the pre-shift movie almost dominates the post-shift one. The film takes a lot of time setting up King and the gang to the point that we might all be perfectly content if the film remained Wright's version of The Big Chill. But the shift into Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory works because it all clicks thematically in fun and surprising ways. It's no accident that a film exploring the links between nostalgia and conformity selects automatons as its antagonists.

The film's visions of what conformity means is interesting in that Wright and Pegg don't automatically discount the Starbucked life the robots are offering. Like in Hot Fuzz, it seems as if nostalgia and conformity are linked in Wright's mind. King may prod and tease his friends for working for 'The Man' and living flavorless lives, but it seems like they have more options than King. He may have succeeded in staying away from societal norms, but his freedom and his refusal to let go of his youth has put him in damaging routines that he isn't even aware of. The film sympathizes with his desire to be the ultimate individual while observing that the quest has made him a friendless slave to drugs and alcohol. Ultimately, it seems that King knows he's a fuck-up, but he wants the freedom to be a fuck-up, even if that's not exactly freedom and has disastrous consequences for everyone around him. That's a pretty tough conundrum for a comedy to present but Wright handles it about as deftly as one can handle such a messy worldview. In a dark, telling echo of Shaun of the Dead, the gang doesn't just have to fight robots, but King, who's insistence that they finish the Golden Mile and get to The World's End starts to seem more self-serving and suicidal by the minute.

That multifaceted view of King and his situation is what makes the film so good, and that lens is also turned on King's "friends" who all have their own outlooks on their youth and how the town has changed. Nick Frost does a fantastic job playing against type as the mature one of the group and there's a scene where Eddie Marsan encounters a former bully that's touching to say the least. It is a pity that we don't get the same kind of detail with the character played by the wonderful Rosamund Pike, who is saddled with being "the girl." Pegg and Wright have consistently shown an eagerness to be emotionally honest and mature with the film's they make together, so they owe it to themselves to stop underwriting their female parts.

Still, World's End is fantastic. Wright and Pegg have capped off an already excellent series with their most thoughtful entry without ever losing their sense of humor. The film might be about alcoholism, lost innocence and self-destruction, but it's also a really funny movie about alcoholism, lost innocence and self-destruction. Also the robots are a blast. In a year filled with dumb sci-fi (Elysium, Man of Steel) and moronic looking comedies (does anyone actually want to see The Family?), it's exciting to see a film like this, take on these issues so successfully and emerge as a great ode to the joys and pitfalls of getting loaded.

Grade: A

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STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

J.J. Abrams's first Star Trek film was one of the more ingenious reboots ever pulled off.  A splendid, efficient blockbuster that somehow found a way to give all seven principal cast members something important to do. Sure it lacked some of the philosophy and allegory the franchise is known for, but it had a surprising amount of emotional resonance and the same blinding optimism that has always set Trek apart from more dour visions of the future.

Four years later we have the blandly titled sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, a good film that escapes the "Every Other Trek" curse, but is still lesser than the previous outing. It does manage to inject some of the allegory and philosophizing that the original missed out on, but has traded some of that efficiency and emotional resonance.

By the end of J.J. Abrams's first Star Trek film we saw James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) go from disgraced cadet to captain of the Enterprise in about a day. As Into Darkness opens we realize that perhaps he was promoted too quickly. A survey mission goes awry when Kirk saves Spock (Zachary Quinto) by violating the Prime Directive, that "unbreakable" Trek law that prevents interference with primitive space-cultures. Kirks cocky recklessness results in him being demoted and losing command of the Enterprise.

That is until Starfleet is attacked by former officer turned terrorist John Harrison (Bennidict Comberbach). After the ruble clears, Starfleet gives Kirk back the Enterprise and sends him off on a secret revenge mission to hunt down and kill Harrison, who's hiding out in Klingon space. The "kill" part irks Spock, who feels that Harrison should stand trial, and by simply killing him, Starfleet is throwing out its principles of justice because it's inconvenient to them.

After a series of major twists, the film turns into something of a political thriller, slightly reminiscent of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Just as that film was ostensibly about the political paranoia surrounding the end of the Cold War, Into Darkness is a lot to do with the moral sacrifices America has made during the War on Terror. There are callbacks to other Trek films as well, for a while, it's of interesting how Abrams is remixes bits and bites of the cannon to suit his own needs. Iconic Trek scenes are restaged with some really inventive reversals. This strategy isn't as bold as the reboot, but it never goes for simple rehashing either. It goes a bit too far at times, but it's clear that Abrams is having a lot of fun playing in his decidedly and increasingly alternate Nu-Trek universe.

All this is interspersed with big, loud action scenes that perhaps didn't need to be so big, loud or long. There are some good ones, I was particularly fascinated by the production design of the opening chase which seems to have been inspired by infrared photography, and seeing the Enterprise take a pounding is still good for a few tugs on the heart strings. But there are also a few set pieces that felt a bit airless and give us way too much time to think about those thriller aspects. I am notorious among my friends for never seeing plot-twists coming, but by the end of a big fight scene on the Klingon home world (the name of which, astute Trekkies will note, the film misspelled) I had deduced 75% of what was going to happen. The thriller works as allegory, but less so as a plot in a movie that hangs together.

Abrams's tries to cover this with the films fast pace and the strong chemistry of the cast, and it mostly works. Everyone is as charismatic as they should be and most of the jokes land, even if some cast members feel a bit more shoehorned than last time (no one ever knows what to do with Chekov). Simon Pegg's Scotty is still very likeable, Karl Urban gets more to do as Dr. McCoy. If the film has an emotional heart, it's the tense, but clearly loving relationship between Quinto and Zoë Saldaña's Uhura. This provides the film with a dynamite subplot about the way we choose to deal with our emotions, particularly where tragedy is concerned. It's in these scenes that Into Darkness almost rebottles the magic of the reboot.

In the villain department, Comberbach provides an excellent foil for Kirk, even if his character seems at the mercy of a third act trying very hard to pull off one too many twists. There's a moment near the end, when everything is barreling along at top-speed in typical Abrams fashion, where the film could have slowed down and given us an iconic show-stopper of an ending that would have had us all talking for years. But instead, it just keeps going and going until all the most interesting stuff has either been minimized or undone. Must every blockbuster end with two people hitting each other on top of a green screen set? I know the last film ended like this too, but there it felt like a primal culmination, here it feels forced.

I enjoyed Into Darkness, but notably less so than its predecessor. Good, instead of outstanding. The machine is less well oiled, and is starting to clunk, still more than enough of it works. It feels more like classic Trek, it just needs more finesse and maybe more boldness.

Grade: B

Note: I saw the film in IMAX 3D. About a quarter of the film was shot in the IMAX format which is great, but none of it was shot in 3D which isn't. The quality of the conversion was actually pretty good, but it does lessen the natural majesty that IMAX tends to convey and neither format does anything to enhance the political allegory one bit.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL

The Mission: Impossible films have never been very substantive. So much so that the third film shocked some by having a coherent plot. Even the Bond films are deeper than these. What the series is good at is providing a playground for great stunts. An action movie test lab if you will. In that sense Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is a rousing success.

The plot is cut and dried. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his I.M.F. team (I.M.F. stands for "Impossible Mission Force"- love that!) are disavowed after a failed recon mission leaves the Kremlin in ruins. They must clear their name and stop a terrorist from destroying the world itself!

It's a more coherent film than most of the series with extra attention paid to Hunt's team. From the previous film we have the over-eager technician Benji (Simon Pegg), and new additions like the slightly worn out Jane (Paula Patton), and the mysterious analyst named Brandt (Jeremy Renner). The team has great chemistry and unlike many ensemble action films, no one feels extra. It's still Tom Cruise's show, but it's more balanced and everyone has plenty to do (particularly Pegg). The story may be light but the character relationships have an intricate feeling to them.

Outside of a young Jackie Chan, is there a living actor as committed to extreme stunt-work than Tom Cruise? In one nail-biting sequence Ethan must run around the outside of Dubai's Burj Kahlifa hotel, the tallest building in the world. Another actor would have done the done close ups against bluescreen, used a stunt double, etc. But not Cuise, that is the actual Tom Cruise running and jumping roughly 2,000 feet above the ground without a safety net! It's a great stunt, but more importantly, it's a well constructed sequence. The closest that any of these sequels have come to equaling the suspense the Langley break-in from the original.

The danger of having such a spellbinding stunt so early in the film is that nothing can top it. But that doesn't mater as even the more artificial action scenes are great fun. Such as a sequence where Hunt must pursue a target through a giant sandstorm, a prison break based around a Dean Martin song or a climactic fight inside an automated parking garage (it works like a giant vending machine and as ridiculous as it looks apparently such things do exist).

If there's another thing that these films do is provide a great template for directors. Each film has had a different director and each film has unique stylistic thumbprint. Ghost Protocol is no different. It is particularly notable for being the live-action debut of Simpsons and Pixar vet Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille). This is an extremely fun and triumphant debut full of Birds trademark humor. If he chooses to, Bird can very easily become one of the worlds best action-directors. This is not as personal as his earlier films, buy hey, it's Mission: Impossible.

Grade: A-

I saw the film in IMAX. If you can afford it, I recommend it. Roughly 30 minutes of the film was shot using the format and the results are breathtaking. Bird engulfs the audience with the 9 story screen. The dust of the desert. The vertigo of climbing the building. It's all much more real and immediate thanks to the large format film stock.



Picture this 9 stories tall!