by Brett Parker
The beauty of filmmaker Edgar Wright is how he sets out to make humorous, tongue-in-cheek send-ups of beloved film genres and ends up making masterful displays that can stand with any film in said genre. Shaun of the Dead brought a surprisingly lyrical heart to a zombie picture while Hot Fuzz dished out expert cops-and-robbers excess that put most action flicks in its genre to shame. And of course, the towering masterpiece Scott Pilgrim vs. the World put the youth genre through the pop culture ringer to create of one of the most acute understandings of young emotions Hollywood ever produced. Now comes The World’s End, which aims to be a silly spoof of alien invasion flicks but ends up doing social sci-fi better than most serious social sci-fi movies. To wheel out big laughs while showing off expert cinematic goods is the mark of a great director, and I definitely think Edgar Wright is one of the best directors working today.
As the film opens, we meet Gary King (Simon Pegg), a hedonistic alcoholic recounting tales of his wild youth for a therapy group he's in. Gary's favorite youthful memory is the time him and his old school mates attempted to complete "The Golden Mile," a pub crawl consisting of 12 pubs in his small hometown of Newton Haven. The young lads never did make it all the way to the final bar, "The World's End," and this has always irked Gary. So it's now that Gary decides to track down his old buds so they can finish what they started 20 years ago.
As Gary tries to round up the old gang and convince them to once again attempt such a drunken quest, he discovers that they've all moved onto comfortable yet boring grown-up lives. The timid Peter (Eddie Marsdan) is now a married car salesman, self-conscious Steven (Paddy Considine) is a divorced construction boss, no-nonsense Oliver (Martin Freeman) is a successful realtor, and disillusioned Andie (Nick Frost) is a lawyer who wants nothing to do with Gary anymore. Yet through the power of cockeyed persuasion, Gary gets the gang back home to try the pub crawl once again and see how it plays out.
As the fellas throw themselves into the follow-up to their boozy adventure, they find things aren't as breezy as the last time around. Not only has the passage of time hardened their once sweet friendships, but the town of Newton Haven itself seems spectacularly bland and sanitized. The guys wonder if something fishy is going on, and their suspicions are confirmed when Gary unwittingly takes a bar patron’s head off in a bathroom and discovers a robot's body underneath the human skin. The guys soon gathers that some higher entity has been replacing the citizens of Newton Haven with compliant human replicas. But who, or what, exactly is in charge of such a supernatural scheme, and will they let the fellas survive the night? Gary convinces his friends that the only way to stay safe and get to the bottom of this scary conspiracy is to continue on with the pub crawl and hopefully get out of town alive in the end.
After a zombie plague and a police shoot-em-up, an alien invasion feels like the next sensible territory for screenwriters Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright to shine their comedic light on. But instead of an Attack the Block-style slugfest, The World’s End aims to send up Invasion of the Body Snatcher, the classic about an alien race trying to eradicate human free will through creepy clones. Yet as Wright tears through this alien tale with booze-soaked hilarity, the story ends up speaking oceans about the current state of society we live in. Steven at one point notes how all the local pubs have been “Starbucked,” whereas a higher power has sanitized the shabby charms and hole-in-the-wall distinctions right out of the pub-going experience. And it’s definitely not hard to see how we live in a world where corporations are out to make everything accessible to everyone by draining the world of independent coarseness and colorful shabbiness. At one point, the aliens inform Gary how they’ve utilized personal technology to keep Earthlings in line, and even the most enthusiastic iPhone user has to admit that we’ve become slaves to machines. It’s hilarious how this film turns out to be more ideologically savvy than The Invasion, the recent “classy” body snatchers film starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig that was an instant flop.
Not only does The World’s End set out to spoof Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but even The Big Chill as well. In the midst of all this intergalactic craziness, the characters hold one of those midlife reunions where grown-up complacency and Peter Pan Syndrome hold a death match with each other. So it’s extra fun seeing how an alien attack energizes the living hell out of the fellas’ past traumas and adult hang-ups. Not only does the suburban comforts and real-world conformity that most of these lads favor make them ripe to become the very robot replacements they’re battling against, but Gary’s frowned-upon wildman instincts make him the ideal candidate to lead them all through a supernatural crisis situation. In a more serious film, Gary’s devil-may-care recklessness would be a source of tragedy, but here it gets recast as awesome heroism. It’s a great joke that a chaos-prone head-case like Gary would make for an excellent doomsday warrior who could make mincemeat of Mad Max.
Wright has stated how The World’s End is the final chapter in the “Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy,” which allowed Pegg and Frost to tear through their favorite adrenaline-fueled genres with comic glee (all three films are also linked by the presence of Cornetto ice cream in each film). I wish these Cornetto movies could keep going on forever, for Pegg, Frost, and Wright could probably bring big laughs and exhilarating skill to every genre there’s ever been. Not only do these films show the excitement of fanboys dropped into cinematic situations they’ve only dreamed about, but they also prove that friendship can survive in any disastrous situation. Yet even as this exciting trilogy comes to a close, it warms my heart to know that Pegg, Frost, and Wright will continue working in general. For Pegg and Frost reading the phonebook could have us in stitches and Wright directing a chamber drama could turn out to be cinematic dynamite.
