The World's End (2013)

Just in the interests of full discolusure let me make this statement right off the bat: Shaun of the Dead gets my vote as the best film of the 21st century, and my reverence for Spaced is nearly as high. I adore Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and while I'm not under any illusions that they can do no wrong, I do contend that they can do no wrong while they've got Edgar Wright watching over them.
So I came to The World's End with a great deal of excitement, but also some trepidation. I didn't want to be let down, you know? Intellectually I know it isn't going to be another Shaun, but inevitably there's a bit of my brain that's thinking, “Oh, there's a new Shaun coming out!” and that's kind of hard to ignore. I kept telling myself that if it was just as good as Hot Fuzz I would be happy.
Our set-up is pretty simple: Gary King (Simon Pegg) used to be the ringleader of the youth in the little town of Newton Haven. We open on a now-middle-aged Gary telling his therapy group about a night when he tried to do a twelve-stop pub crawl with his gang of friends: Andy (Nick Frost), his best friend; Steven (Paddy Considine), the rival to the throne; Oliver (Martin Freeman), the uptight and ambitious geek; and Peter (Eddie Marsan), the younger boy who tags along with everything the gang does. On the original night the boys only made it through nine pubs, so Gary decides to get the gang back together for another try. Unfortunately, in the course of the evening, they uncover an invasion by alien robots, or "blanks." Easy enough.
The opening montage is pretty good, but I actually like what comes right after better, the start of the story proper, where Gary is going to the guys, talking them into doing the pub crawl. It's funny, but more than that it tells us absolutely everything we need to know about Gary: that he's always got a comeback, that he can't be reasoned with, that he's impervious to anything anyone else says. “Do you know your problem, Gary? You're never wrong,” Andy complains, to which Gary replies, “How is that a problem?”
It sets up the way the other guys look at him well, also. Peter is a little reluctant, but clearly still has a bit of a hero-worship thing going on, and is somewhat under Gary's spell. Steven is determined not to be pushed around by Gary, keeps dropping little lines attempting to assert his superiority, but somehow ends up getting dragged along in Gary's wake anyway. Oliver is sort of detached, telling himself that he's coming along for ironic enjoyment, to see how screwed up things are going to get. I get the impression that this is roughly how their relationship worked as kids, as well. Andy, of course, is the exception, because his relationship with Gary is the one that has really changed, but otherwise it's a pretty econimcal set-up for the characters, past and present.
I do have to ask a question at this point, though....why on Earth does Andy believe Gary's line about his mother's death? There can't be anyone else who knows Gary that would believe that story. He's so clearly someone who will say anything to get his way. It's a bit of a weak point, but since it gets the story going I'm prepared to forgive it.
As with all of Wright's movies, there's a ton of foreshadowing at the beginning of the movie. Practically everything anybody says, practically every image we see, will come back later in the film. Actually, Wright plays with this a little bit, having a few obvious bits that don't pay off. The scene where the guys meet at the station and Oliver says that Gary will outlive them all grabbed me the very first time he said it. “Oh, everybody's gonna die and Gary will die last, or be the only survivor!” But immediately after that comes the discussion of the Musketeers, with Gary saying that there should have been five so that two could die and they'd still have three, and that's pretty obvious as well, isn't it? So I started trying to figure out which three would live. It was easy to figure that Pegg and Frost would be two, so which of the other three? Freeman was the obvious choice just from a casting standpoint, as a much bigger star than either Marsan or Considine, but since we know from the opening montage that Steven made it to the end of the original night it had to be him. Also, I submit that Frost's “Are we there yet?” in that conversation is the best use of that tired old line ever.
Anyway, it might be fun to comb through this movie and write down every tiny bit of foreshadowing and recurring dialog, but that would run to the tens of thousands of words and this isn't a good spot for it. I mostly mention it because one criticism I've heard about this movie is that there's too much repeated dialog, and that annoys me. “Repetitive” is a word I hear a lot in discussions of The World's End, but I love the running jokes in this; in fact, that's very much the point of the movie, and is always gonna be with a Wright/Pegg script. I don't understand the complaint at all, frankly.
I adore the cast in this. In fact, it might be even better than the main cast of Shaun. Rosamund Pike, who plays Oliver's sister Sam (a love interest both for Gary and Steven), is an actress I've always liked, and it's nice to see her in something I'll actually want to watch again as opposed to, say, Die Another Day. It's not the best part any actress have ever been given, of course. It might just be that I watched this and Frances Ha so close together, and am therefore very much aware of how shallow the female characters of male writers can be, comparing them to Greta Gerwig's Frances. The character is pretty ordinary, but suffers in the comparison. I wish there'd been more here for her, but she's very good with what she's got. Also I like it that she keeps saying “Oh, crumbs!” every time she's surprised. I'm a big Dangermouse fan, and that's very Penfold.
An aside: supposedly Pike was originally cast as Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class, and I want to go on record here saying that she might have given that movie an extra star; she suits the role far better than January Jones. I doubt I'll ever write about that one, since I don't expect to see it again, but I bet I'd be more interested if Rosamund Pike had been in it.
Considine is good as the smart and competent guy who somehow always gets overwhelmed by the force of Gary's personality, and Freeman nearly as good as the detached, ironic, but still irritable Oliver. Marsan is better than either, and in fact I'll go so far as to say I've never seen him better. He really nails that mopey quality, and I wish that Gary had been more obviously protective of him (I do quite like the scene in the opening montage where the bully smacks Peter with his bookbag and Gary stands up for him, but nothing is really made of that).
It was nice to see Nick Frost getting a chance to play a different kind of character. I'm so used to seeing him as a big kid, but he does a really good job as a grown-up, a lawyer wrestling with real-life issues and frustrated at the behavior in his friend that typifies the characters he usually plays. Prior to Spaced Frost wasn't an actor at all, and pretty much his whole career since then has been more or less under the auspices of Pegg and Wright. I'm hoping that after this he'll be on his own. I look forward to seeing what he's got.
Pegg's Gary has been the lightning rod for this film from folks who don't like it. Personally I think he does a great job playing a very nearly unredeemable character, but of course that means that he's a bit unlikeable on a first watch. I saw a lot of myself in Gary, and I think that's why I disliked him so much the first time I saw this, but he has definitely grown on me. I still like Pegg better as Shaun, but I would go so far as to say that I like this portrayal better than Nick Angel in Hot Fuzz. I think he does exactly what the part requires.
As with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, though, the real star of this movie is Wright's direction, and I continue to be amazed at his progression as a filmmaker. In my opinion he's the best director under 40 out there (though as of April 18th that won't be true anymore). He has a real flair for how comedy ought to progress, and how to knit together many tiny threads into an appealing cloth, but what's interesting is that he's become a really solid action director. The opening fight in the bathroom is very well-put-together (the bit where Gary knocks the first robot's head off in particular), but what I really like is when Andy gets up, rips his sweater open, screams “I hate this town,” and lays into the blanks with a pair of stools. Nick Frost, Action Hero, is not something I expected ever to see, but I really like it.
The ending is not all I might have wanted it to be. In the first place, it really bothers me that Gary doesn't get his last pint at The World's End. More than anything else in the film I understood Gary's desire for those twelve drinks, and it feels like a terrible let-down that he only got eleven. Also, I don't get why the blanks leaving sent us back to the dark ages, even if they did provide the know-how for all the digitized connectivity. We already had plenty of technology before they arrived, so shouldn't we at worst go back to the world of the early nineties? No smart phones, but at least cars and radio and, you know, electricity? Allowing for a world-wide EMP that destroyed every circuit on the planet, we know how to make new circuits, right? Even I understand the principle, and I am not a practical-minded man. And the closing monologue from Frost could be better, though I do like the image of Gary wandering the countryside with the robot forms of his old friends, getting in trouble. It's not a terrible ending, but it's a bit jarring coming at the end of a film that otherwise so carefully written and smoothly directed. To be honest, there's nothing I really like after we see Sam, Gary, Andy, and Steven on the hillside watching the town burn. That would have made a great ending, if a bit abrupt. If something had to come after, I wish it had been a better something.
But the ending doesn't spoil the film for me. It just prevents it from being perfect. It's behind Shaun, of course, and behind Scott Pilgrim as well, but it's very much on par with Hot Fuzz, and as with all Edgar Wright films I'm sure I'll like it more upon the many, many re-watches I'm bound to give it.

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: Just the relationships between the five boys and, to a lesser extent, Sam. One thing I've heard a lot in reviews of this movie is that it might have been better if it had been just the pub-crawl, without the invasion aspect. I can't agree with that, but I do get it; the movie is at its best when it's just those six people talking. Great writing, and great performances all around.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The first time I saw this I shouted “Don't let Oliver go to the john alone!” It was obvious that, if the blanks could get any of the boys alone, they'd be assimilated. And then Oliver comes back, no longer drunk, no longer stressed out, no longer angry when the boys make inappropriate remarks about his sister, and very much on Gary's side about not leaving town. It's obvious that Oliver is a blank, but the movie plays that out waaay too long. I mentioned that the ending let me down, and to be honest that's the worst thing, but this happened right in the middle of the movie still being really good and it jars a bit, so I had to mention it.

PUNCH THE AIR MOMENT: When the robot consciousness says “It's pointless arguing with you.” I love the idea of humanity being so stubborn, belligerent, and idiotic that higher races would simply give up on us. It's a beautiful thought, the very antithesis of the sugary Star Trek speeches you'd get once or twice a year about our great potential. I find it far more emotionally satisfying. Also, I'm a big Sisters of Mercy fan and was turned on all movie by Gary's T-shirt, so when the blank version of Gary appears with the choral opening of "This Corrosion" playing...well, that wrecked me a little bit.

SCORE: 8/10. A better ending would have given it a clean nine stars, but you can't have everything. Like I said, I told myself coming in that if this movie was as good as Hot Fuzz it would be a success, and that's what I got. Considering that this year all of my other most-anticipated films have been at least slightly disappointing (outside of The Grandmaster, which I still haven't managed to see), I'm pretty well satisfied with this.

LISTS: Favorites of the Teens (so far).