One of the biggest problems people will have with The World's End is that it's not Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. And they'll be right. The World's End is not Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. But let's be honest: Hot Fuzz was not Shaun of the Dead. And Shaun of the Dead was not Spaced. It's been 14 years since Spaced, 9 years since Shaun of the Dead and 6 years since Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are much older than they were when they started The Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy. How could they possibly catch lightning in a bottle again? It's easy: they couldn't. They're not who they once were, so they made a movie about not being who they once were. If Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are about getting older, then The World's End is about being old. Oh, and body-snatching robot aliens.
The World's End opens with Simon Pegg's Gary King cheerily recounting the greatest night of alcoholism he and his four friends shared; a twelve-stop pub crawl when they were beautiful teenagers with the world at their fingertips. "I thought that life couldn't get any better than this. And you know what? It never did," King proudly states, as it's revealed he's regaling this story to an addiction support group. Not the brightest way to start a film. Gary decides it's time to get the band back together and give the "Golden Mile" another crack. The problem is, while he's stayed rooted in the free-wheeling, devil may care attitude of his youth, all of his friends have come to terms with the dangerous consequences such a life carries and have moved on to promotions, families and fitness instructors. This won't stop Gary, who's less concerned with seeing his old friends again and more concerned with indulging his alcoholism in company that allows retention of his arrested development. Their triumphant return to their hometown of Newton Haven isn't quite the loving welcome Gary was hoping for. Nobody seems to recognise him, all of the pubs have been swallowed by corporate franchising and the youth look upon his attitude and demeanour with total apathy. "Perhaps we're not the local legends you thought we were," says Nick Frost's Andy. It seems that way until Gary accidentally decapitates a teenager in the toilets, popping his head off like a Ken doll and shooting a blue, inky substance all over the toilet walls. It turns out that most of the town's citizens have been replaced with replica robots, in some sort of intergalactic merger designed to eradicate humanity's uglier traits. Does this revelation give Gary King the wakeup call he needs to realise the selfish, self-destructive path he's dragging his friends down and force him to call off the 'Golden Mile' so that they may focus on getting out of town alive? Not even a little bit.
Now, I can talk about how this film is funny. Because it is very, very funny. But I was just as affected by and would rather discuss the equally as prevalent serious side The World's End presents. Because I like a comedy that can make me cry; good humour has to come from relatable experiences, and life is never just the laughs. Gary King comes very close to being an irredeemable dick. He lies about his mum's death to convince Andy to join the drunken reunion, he hastily changes the subject when the conversation strays from drinking and when everything goes to shit, his top priority is finishing the 'Golden Mile'. It starts out funny, if a little bit pathetic, but as the movie continues, it starts to become much darker. Why is Gary so intent on finishing this arbitrary, adolescent activity? We are watching a man who is so unbelievably desperate to recapture the false former glory of his youth that even an alien invasion doesn't sway him from that determination. Andy sees this from the start ("We're not your friends, we're your fucking enablers"), and it's his relationship with Gary that is the most emotionally complex and rewarding in this film (as it always is with Pegg and Frost). Something's clearly been driven between them, more so than the others, and about two thirds of the way through, we find out that sixteen years ago, Gary had a drug overdose and Andy, four times over the limit, totalled his car trying to drive him to the hospital. Gary woke up and took off into the night, leaving Andy to nearly die. He doesn't drink anymore, against Gary's oblivious behest, and when he realises Gary was lying about his mum, he's almost overcome with hate. But when Gary takes off to finish the mile when a clear exit out of the city is in their reach, it's Andy who resigns to the fact that he has to follow after his best friend. Because he knows this man, he loves him, and he can see where he's going. And where it's going to end. When Gary eventually reaches the final pub, a pint has already been poured for him. He's about to take his final first sip when Andy smacks the glass out of his hand. They begin to fight, and all of their demons come spewing out. "YOU'VE GOT YOUR PERFECT LIFE," Gary screams. "THIS IS ALL I HAVE LEFT." Andy reveals that he doesn't; his wife left him, and he's trying to get her back, but he knows he won't win. It's not enough for Gary, who tries to have that last drink again. Andy throws him back, Gary's sleeves come down and we see the bandages wrapped around his forearms. He wasn't in a rehab clinic at the beginning of the film; he was in a hospital. "It was never as good as that night," he says, tears in his eyes. "You don't have to do this," Andy implores. "Yeah," Gary says, hand on the lever, glass at the ready. "I do."
Previously in the film, Rosamund Pike's Sam says, "Not everything's about that night, Gary." "Isn't it?" he replies. What does it take for someone as blindingly self-destructive as Gary to change his lifestyle? It's simple: the end of the world. When he pulls the aforementioned lever, he and Andy are lowered into a cold, metallic chamber. A big, bright light appears and, with the smooth, sultry tones of Bill Nighy, it explains that what they've become privy to this evening is the result of nearly a decade of intergalactic espionage; a merging operation to get Earth on track socially with the rest of the galaxy. Advances in telecommunications are their biggest present to us: making us more robotic and disconnected from each other, but hey, at least we're not pissing in the streets anymore! What follows is an unbelievably hilarious and razor sharp argument between the "big lamp", Gary, Andy and Paddy Considine's Steven, in which the drunken fucks point out all of the flaws inherent with this grand scheme: none so much as the fact that everyone in the town bar three people resisted and have since been replaced with robots. The three guys drunkenly berate the luminescent alien ("Why don't you hop in your rocket and fuck off back to Legoland, you cunt"), until it can't stand any more. "Just what is it that you want?" it politely asks. Beautifully quoting Primal Scream's Loaded, Gary says "We wanna be free. We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do." The alien relents. "Yeah. Fuck it," it says as it switches the lights off. Unfortunately, in switching off, it also releases a massive EMP explosion that sets the world back to the Dark Ages. They are literally left to their own devices. Their individual fates are covered in a very brief epilogue, but what happened to Gary? With young robot versions of his four friends, he roams the wasteland looking for water (not alcohol) and slaying robot racists. I'll admit, this threw me a little. At first, I wasn't sure if this hurt or helped support everything the movie had said about Gary preceding it. But then, I came to this conclusion: a man like Gary King can never change who he is fundamentally. When he's willing to attempt suicide because he doesn't understand the concept of growing up, that's a tough shell to break out of. But if there were two things he did well, even if it only applied to a few years of his life, it was being a leader and being a rebel. He rebelled against growing up, he rebelled against life, he rebelled against an all-powerful spacial entity and now he's rebelling against the new world the apocalypse has wrought: one that doesn't accept robots. And there's a whole mess of those robots looking for some leadership.
Early on in The World's End, Eddie Marsan's Pete encounters the bully who made his life a living hell when he was a child. Their exchange? He asks Pete if he can use a vacant stool. "The worst part is he didn't even recognise me. It's like all of that torture meant nothing," Peter says. Of course, the real reason he didn't recognise him is because he was a robot, and later on, when Peter's had much, much more to drink and gets lost in the forest, the bully appears again, and offers a hand, to apologise for his actions when they were younger. When Gary, Andy and Steven catch up, Peter is savagely beating him into the ground. "Come on mate, it's not worth it!" they implore. "YES, IT FUCKING IS," Peter roars back at them, tears streaming down his face as he throws the last punch and breaks open his head. It's a brutal, gut-wrenching scene that gave me chills and made me cry. And then it made me laugh, uproariously, when in the following shot Pete is running at the robot with a large tree branch in a fantastic throwback to a Fawlty Towers episode. And to me, there's no better summary of The World's End than that. Edgar Wright and Co. have created an utterly beautiful commentary on adulthood, friendship and addiction that somehow also manages to socially satirise the human race in the most affectionate way possible and bring an end to their genre-drenched legacy. As repetitive as I know I'm beginning to sound, it made me laugh just as much as it made me cry, but I think the reason I keep saying that is because I'm struggling to find the words to say just how much these movies mean to me. The list of what I truly treasure in this world isn't very long, but The Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy is most certainly on there. They are a fucking triumph of modern film-making, and the day I get to show them to my children will be as monumental to me as the day my father took a fourteen-year-old me to see Shaun of the Dead.
This is easily your best article yet. Nice work.
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