The Reel Critic: The World's End

It feels like The World’s End was made using some kind of miraculous alchemy. This is the third movie by director/writer team Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg which is spastically, ridiculously funny while somehow remaining sincere and even poignant. The basic structure sees the once cool, now-alcoholic Gary (Simon Pegg) drag his four old buddies from their adult lives towards their hometown of Newton Haven in an attempt to complete the epic 12 pub bar-crawl they failed to complete years ago. The last bar is the titular “World’s End,” which, by way of an alien/robot/blue people invasion, becomes a delightfully appropriate name. The themes underlying this comedic storm of an invasion are the anesthetized consumer life, melancholic nostalgia and finally alcoholism. There is a literal alien invasion going on around him and Gary has to reach “World’s End” to get one more beer because it is “all he has.” This is an astonishing comedic balance to pull off, yet, The World’s End makes it look so easy.

Gary repeatedly tells us that his life was never better than that night: he bumbles around bars announcing his name as if he were a legend who everyone would remember. He recalls all of the little moments from the first bar crawl with a weird precision. Of course, Gary remembers all of the minutiae so well because he has never actually left that moment – and of course, everyone has forgotten the legendary Gary already. The World’s End centers itself on this metaphor: people don’t remember partially because it has been 20 years, and partly because Newton Haven has had its population removed and replaced by the aforementioned aliens, who want to “civilize” humans. Gary stands for – or thinks he stands for – individuality and freedom in his immaturity, so naturally he leads the charge in a massive, outlandish, hilarious fight against the robot/aliens.

The World’s End is fundamentally a fast-paced movie: the dialogue is up-tempo, the action scenes are cut quickly as Wright rapidly darts from scene to scene. The movie consciously takes the cliché “never a dull moment” and then speeds everything up from that baseline – it’s all great fun.

At the same time, Pegg knows exactly when to stop and give us the static shot; like when four of Gary’s buddies are sitting around the first pub awkwardly, not knowing what to say to each other after 10 years, and not knowing why they’ve come. It shows a great deal of restraint from Wright to even allow such scenes in the middle of the comedic chaos that is The World’s End.

What has always been great about writers Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg is that the crises they depict are not themselves the central problem for their characters – the apocalypse is an almost incidental annoyance that prohibits them from solving their other problems. In Shaun of The Dead, the zombies were annoying foremost because they prevent Frost and Pegg’s characters from drinking and dicking around. The World’s End operates almost inversely: the characters have already matured here, and the alien invasion has dragged them back towards their youth.

It’s true that the movie’s first third has a different tone and demeanor which is quite abruptly and quite literally torn apart by the alien invasion. But in the world of Pegg and Frost, this transition makes a strange amount of sense – the populous of Newton Haven long complains about being “robots” before we learn that they are actual robots. They are people that have retreated to a comfortable life in a static town, going through routines as machines. In this way, it feels both logical and necessary that the town be peopled by actual robots.

The World’s End is one of the funniest, nicest, and most pleasantly ridiculous movies I’ve seen since Wright and Pegg’s earlier work. It feels like we’re checking in on old friends each time Wright, Pegg, and the rest of their gang make a new movie – and the The World’s End is stylized in such a way that it unmistakably belongs to them. There are few directors who even try something such as The World’s End, and other than Pegg and Wright, there is essentially no one else making movies who can pull it off.