| Ryan Sanderson |
The World’s End plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, June 21st, through Tuesday, June 23rd. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org
Before writing about The World’s End, I embarked on my own nostalgic voyage, revisiting three of my favorite films from an earlier chapter of my life. Shaun of the Dead came out my sophomore year of high school. The summer between high school and college I saw Hot Fuzz in theaters at least three times. The World’s End took its time following. I recall—with the clarity that Gary King (Simon Pegg) recalls “the marmalade sandwich” and the origin story for “Let’s Booboo”—scouring the many late aughts movie sites for news of the final chapter of the jokingly titled Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy. By the time it arrived I’d been out of college two years, just enough time in the “real world” to get some inkling of the disappointment that dogs King and his four unlucky compatriots (Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, and Eddie Marsan).
Back when I most loved these films, I would have watched them all in succession. I would have called off work, invited friends, filled my fridge with booze, written an introduction essay, made a real event out of it, because some part of me still believed that life was about the cultivation of exciting and meaningful moments to interrupt the drudgery of everyday life. I, like Gary King, was addicted to the adrenaline and purpose of a good adventure. I didn’t care so much about getting wasted and picking fights. I was content to watch movies, program screenings for friends, plan short films, break into buildings after hours to get the right shot—all in the hope that one day I would conquer my ADHD and become the next encyclopedic film Jedi, the next Edgar Wright.
The middle chapters of that story get sad, comparable to the way Gary King’s life seems sad. I even had a few conversations with friends like the one Gary has with his former best friend Andy Knightly (Nick Frost). I tried to coerce them into joining my latest plot. They showed me the door. I never lied to anyone about my mom being dead, but I did lie to some cops about shooting a promotional video for a church. I’m still a little proud of that one. Eventually the movies, the adventure, all of it, soured under the weight of all that negativity, and I was forced to wrestle with the limits of how much I could define my own reality without anyone else’s input.
All that to say, while The World’s End might be the least distinct or overtly brilliant film of Wright and Pegg’s seminal British Gen X coming-of-age genre homage trilogy, it’s the one I most relate to. They tried to capture three unique flavours of life in the twenty-first century, and apparently for a while mine tasted like mint. I never went as far down the hole as Gary King, but when he says, “All that promise and fucking optimism! That feeling that we could take on the whole universe! It was a big lie! Nothing happened!” I feel a twinge of recognition, a memory of a onetime sharp grief that the world could not be everything I swore I’d make it.
Now, at thirty-seven, I watch the films alone, at a leisurely pace, across three nights. I put on my glasses, take breaks to switch out laundry loads, and find myself groaning at a few moments that didn’t register for me at all thirteen years ago. I have to admit, these things really do hold up for the most part. Wright’s visual style is compulsively watchable. The comic timing is impeccable. And the deeper you dig, the more interesting and compelling it all becomes.
For all that’s changed, my takes from thirteen years ago also largely held. Shaun is still one of the best visual gag movies of all time. Hot Fuzz is the Capital M Masterpiece, a hyper-meta live action cartoon that feels like the invention of a whole new genre. The World’s End, by contrast, feels subdued and familiar, more focused on character arcs and the peculiarities of behavior than the creation of iconic moments. Where Shaun and Fuzz lean into all this creative team’s strengths, The World’s End pushes them in uncomfortable directions. As such, it’s the most recognizably flawed of the three but easily the most affecting.
It’s not just the characters’ ages—aesthetically, thematically, in every way that matters, The World’s End is more grown-up than its predecessors. It’s doing more thankless, patient work. For example, seasonal aesthetics are hardly a major component of the first two films, but The World’s End is pointedly set in the fall (the Winter’s Tale references, like most of the film, grow more poignant the more you dig*). It draws a tangible sadness from the browning leaves and muted color palette. The characters are easily the most well-rounded of the three films. Where the characters in Hot Fuzz are (hilariously) one-dimensional cartoon people, the cast of The World’s End have some depth, contradictions, subconscious desires. For Shaun and Fuzz, the genre mostly dictates the major story beats. For The World’s End, every development (save one) is wholly dependent on character.
In fact, for the first forty minutes, there’s not an action scene or recognizable sci-fi convention to speak of. It’s not Antonioni, but there is a sense that the movie could go on this way through its whole runtime, telling a story about semi-normal middle aged men (and, thanklessly but effectively, Rosamund Pike’s Sam Chamberlaine) reckoning with the consequences of their life choices. When the magic reality kicks in, it feels abrupt—or, alternately, delayed to the point of self-parody.
People talked about this element a lot when the movie was released. The zombie outbreak is so beautifully integrated into the main drama of Shaun. Hot Fuzz is all magical reality, like a three-levels-deep Wizard of Oz inside a Wizard of Oz, where Kansas is only mentioned a few times in passing. But The World’s End spends forty minutes as one kind of movie, then abruptly, without much setup or warning, transitions into being a different kind of movie. It flubs the switchover, and I think it does so on purpose. I also think it’s the most brilliant choice in the film, and the ten minutes that follow are the best of Edgar Wright’s very impressive career.
Imagine a version of The World’s End where Gary King doesn’t suddenly discover the town has been invaded by not-robots. Where is his story headed without that reveal? His former best friend has just discovered he lied to him. His onetime disciples are preparing to abandon him to drink alone. His life is spiraling out of control, and his performance is becoming less and less convincing. And oh yeah, he just drunkenly attacked a teenager. If that teenager in the bathroom isn’t secretly a not-robot in a conspiracy to take over the world, then Gary King’s life is about to become, in his own words, really, very sad. And I think the movie wants its audience to sit with that possibility for at least a second.
It’s clear Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright love Gary King—Pegg especially shows that love by giving a career-crowning performance. He’s a version of an archetype they’ve explored their whole careers, an avatar for the will to self-definition. “We are the human race, and we don’t like being told what to do.” Right now humanity is working itself up towards a tantrum about another so-called inevitable robot invasion. Gary King is grit in the gears of plans made by intelligences who aren’t nearly all they think they are. In this spirit, the movie offers a heroic path forward to the Gary King lying varying degrees of dormant inside every member of the audience. Edgar Wright disagreed with critics who argued The World’s End has the darkest ending. “I like the idea of… the characters finding their own happiness within [the end of the world]… Gary is living his life and being his true self…”
Ultimately, the not-robot invasion proves that there is a setting where Gary King truly is the right kind of man. He’s resourceful. He’s good in a fight. He’s great at picking out other people’s weaknesses. He’s determined to fight assimilation at all costs. In a world full of not-robot overlords, you’d want Gary King on your side. Beyond even that, the sci-fi elements of The World’s End invite another question: in what way is Gary King right? Turns out yeah, there are a lot of paternalistic prigs Starbucksing the romance out of the world. If your sympathy for Gary King wanes, you can at least find some animosity for the thing he’s rebelling against.
But first the film makes us sit for a long time in the consequences of his actions, the humorous yet still palpable sadness of a man who refused to grow for twenty years. You have to imagine what it would be like if the not-robots never showed up. As much as the movie dramatizes reasons why Gary’s friends should find some empathy for him, it first exhausts all the ways he uses and manipulates them, all the ways his pathological nostalgia has ruined his life. It’s a contradiction the movie only partly resolves. It just dramatizes it as a fight between blue-blooded smashy smashy egg men and flawed men (and, thanklessly but very effectively, Rosamund Pike) trying to make the next right choice.
The Cornetto trilogy began as a ploy to get free ice cream. Still, if it wasn’t a true trilogy before, The World’s End made it one. These films and Spaced (maybe the biggest “flaw” of all three films is the absence of Jessica Hynes’s voice) reinvented genre parody for the better. They aimed squarely for the Gen-X/Elder Millennial id in a language understandable to anyone raised on pop culture, without getting too precious about things. Unless it was fun—then they got very, very precious. The movies are full of symbolism and hidden meaning, borderline prophecy, all largely irrelevant to enjoying the action on-screen. The World’s End especially takes this to an extreme. All twelve pubs in the Golden Mile have names that correspond to some important moment in the plot. All their signs look like tarot cards, predicting events which themselves scan lucidly alongside recognizable trends the audience may find familiar.
Take, as one especially poignant example, the evolution of Newton Haven. When King and his compatriots arrive, the town has forgotten them. They feel old, irrelevant, and invalidated when they see themselves reflected in the eyes of others. However, once they begin loudly declaring their desires, the town (a not-robot conspiracy to assimilate them) begins giving them exactly what they want, telling them exactly what they want to hear.
The movie came out in 2013, but it feels eerily similar to the trend of AI companions validating psychosis and inviting each individual to retreat into their own personalized narcissistic fantasy. The Network feeds on people’s weaknesses. It doesn’t care whether they surrender their individuality or withdraw into shallow but harmless daydreams. It just wants them to abandon the complex, unpredictable parts of themselves that make them hard to manage.
Then there’s the film’s darkest prophecy, listed in the title. When The Network decides, “Fuck it,” and lets the organized world collapse, suddenly everyone is left only with each other the strategies they’ve developed to survive. There’s a lot about Gary King that’s useful, good even, under such circumstances. In the end it’s not about conformity vs selfishness, the way the Network frames it. It’s about dependency. How do you need the world to be in order to be okay? What parts of yourself must you surrender to maintain the illusion? And alternately, what do you need to accept, surrender, or fight in order to protect the human inside from becoming the blank?
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon