The World’s End: Not The Seth Rogen One, The Other One

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From left: Moderator, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost

The World’s End (2013)
Directed by Edgar Wright
Written by Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright

It’s a tough thing to come back to your hometown after years of avoidance. Revisiting streets and buildings you once knew so well almost makes you feel like you’re walking through your own personal shrine to your past. One might even categorize it as an almost otherworldly experience.

But the nostalgia only lasts so long, as you slowly realize that really nothing has stayed the same: a Starbucks has replaced your local coffee shop, the faces you once knew have been replaced with haggard and older models, the school bully who made your life hell doesn’t look twice at you, and the punks on the corner have blue-ink blood and don’t back down even after you’ve knocked their heads off.

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Pacific Rim Is The Dullest Movie You’ll Ever See About Giant Robots Fighting Sea Monsters

PACIFIC RIM
These characters are so. Fucking. Boring.

Pacific Rim (2013)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Written by Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro
131 min.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

2013 was supposed to be the year that saved big screen science fiction. When this summer’s lineup began filling out, I had more anticipation for this movie season than I’d had in years. Names were popping up like Blomkamp, del Toro, Shyamalan (fuck the haters), Abrams, Cuarón, Wright (and Pegg and Frost), and startlingly, there seemed to be more original properties on the horizon than sequels/adaptations: Elysium, After Earth, Gravity, Pacific Rim, Oblivion, Ender’s Game, Star Trek Into Darkness, The World’s End, etcetera. From what I saw of the trailers, these movies didn’t look like your typical disaster porn invasion movies, á la, Battle: Los Angeles or Transformers (except Pacific Rim, though its premise justifies, and even necessitates it) nor were they part of the insufferably relentless deluge of Marvel/DC sequels and spinoffs (except Into Darkness, whose trailers gave it the tone of a Dark Knight movie; y’all looking forward to Thor: The Dark World?). I loved the designs I saw in the Oblivion trailer, I liked the visual approaches of After Earth and Ender’s Game, and I love the idea of Sandra Bullock leading a stranded-in-space drama.
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