That’s the movie I’m looking for! Edgar Wright’s The World’s End.
The plot of the movie begins with a guy who gathers his old chums together to recreate an epic pub crawl in their hometown.
There’s a twist when it turns out that the hometown has suffered an infestation of alien bodysnatchers and bodyreplacers. The replacements are not-so-sturdy androids called “blanks”.
The main character, Gary King, of the Humans (spoilers!) argues for the fate of humanity with the leader of the aliens, who addresses him as Gary, King of the Humans.
Gary wears a Sisters of Mercy shirt that he hadn’t taken off in twenty years, and the soundtrack is likewise jammed with jams of that bygone Madchester era.
The band of protagonists reunites in their hometown, and director Edgar Wright reunited with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and others for this movie. They even got another former James Bond, though the last one was Timothy Dalton and this one was Pierce Brosnan.
Gary is also an alcoholic not quite back in recovery. Though he participates in many group sessions where everyone sits in a circle and unburdens themselves with painful memories, his memories are his most precious.
This is the third movie in the so-called Cornetto Trilogy, where Wright and crew mashed funny genre spins on other genres with great success. This one was the least memorable compared to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I suspect it’s that this one featured a mostly unsympathetic protagonist, and mashed up four genres: the body-snatcher movie, the Grail Quest, the addiction recovery struggle, and the old farts reliving the glory days, which was one or two genres too many.
- almost all of the movie is pre-apocalyptic. The post-apocalyptic bit is at the end.
Fun fact.
- a series of businesses with names that lie on the continuum of “ironic” and “in retrospect, accurately descriptive”.
"Tonight, we will be partaking of a liquid repast, as we wend our way up the Golden Mile, commencing with an inaugural tankard in The First Post, then on to The Old Familiar, The Famous Cock, The Cross Hands, The Good Companions, The Trusty Servant, The Two-Headed Dog, The Mermaid, The Beehive, The King’s Head, and The Hole in the Wall for a measure of the same. All before the last bittersweet pint in that most fateful terminus - The World’s End. Leave a light on, good lady, for though we may return with a twinkle in our eyes, we will, in truth, be blind - drunk. "
@JoshL, the next pint is on you.
