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The other weekend I celebrated surviving (more or less) my first week of exams for this semester by going to see a movie with my brother. Wanting to try something different, we decided to see the newest installment in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, The World’s End, released this August and directed by Edgar Wright and written by Wright and Simon Pegg. We didn’t know anything about the film or any of its predecessors from this team (2004’s Shaun of the Dead and 2007’s Hot Fuzz); all we understood was that it was a British film and a comedy, an interesting mix to say the least. And after seeing this movie, I am seriously considering seeing the other two for this trilogy.
World’s End follows a group of estranged friends who in their teens attempted the “Golden Mile,” a pub crawl hitting every one of the twelve pubs in their town Newton Haven, leading up to the final eponymous pub “The World’s End.” Twenty years later hard-drinking party animal and self-proclaimed leader Gary King (played by Simon Pegg himself) decides he wants closure and rounds up the old gang—Peter Page (Eddie Marsan), Oliver “O-Man” Chamberlain (Martin Freeman), Steven Prince (Paddy Considine), and Andy Knightley (Nick Frost)—for a visit back to Newton Haven so that this time they might finish the Golden Mile. At first the other four are against it, having long since moved on from adolescent whims and currently living productive lives with jobs and families of their own. But since the story must go on, Gary manages to persuade them, through less than noble means (i.e., lying to Andy about his mother dying).
When they get to Newton Haven they are joined by Oliver’s sister Sam (Rosamund Pike), whose affections Gary and Stephen would fight over in high school, and as it turns out this still causes friction between the two for the first half of the movie. In the bigger picture, the friends are not given the warm reception that Gary had expected; he’s so drunk off his rocker he forgets that he was actually banned from at least one of the pubs after their last escapade. The town has indeed changed, in fact more so than any of the five could imagine. What starts as a seemingly typical comedy makes a sharp and rather terrifying twist involving identity-snatching robot-aliens looking to assimilate all of mankind, supposedly for its betterment. The aliens insist that they are non-violent, but they do not hesitate to employ force if they find it necessary.
Not that any of this dampers Gary’s thirst to finish the Mile and get to The World’s End in the least.
The World’s End is definitely an unusual movie. Despite being a British comedy, I find that the humor isn’t that different from American humor, if several shades darker and kookier at parts. And it isn’t all laughs either; there’s drama, horror, sci-fi, action, some romance and even a semblance of the camaraderie that the five friends used to have. It may strike chords in some people about the world changing often in the opposite direction of you, even places that you used to call home. Gary in particular is interesting as a deconstruction of the longtime party animal: his antics now just look sad and pathetic to onlookers rather than funny as they might have been years ago, but he refuses to let go of his youth because he views it as the highest point in his life and behind his blithe and bawdy façade, he is utterly miserable. And yet in spite of the ending (not going to spoil it, although the movie’s title alone drops a hint), it does carry a high note.
See it while it’s still in theaters, or you can wait until it comes out on DVD and then you can enjoy and ponder over it any time you want. In the meantime, I’m going to look for the other two films for this trilogy!
Poster from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_End_(film)