The World's End

Abstract

The World's End (Dir. Edgar Wright) UK 2013 Universal Pictures Several issues ago, I started putting together the idea for a review (never finished) of the Gothic and horror-inflected collaborations of Edgar Wright (as director and co-writer) and Simon Pegg (as co-writer and star), to mark the release of Hot Fuzz, the second instalment of what's variously termed the "Three Flavours Cornetto" or the "Blood and Ice Cream" Trilogy. [...]it seems, there is only one Gary King, but he does prove capable of change.

The World's End (Dir. Edgar Wright) UK 2013 Universal Pictures

Several issues ago, I started putting together the idea for a review (never finished) of the Gothic and horror-inflected collaborations of Edgar Wright (as director and co-writer) and Simon Pegg (as co-writer and star), to mark the release of Hot Fuzz, the second instalment of what's variously termed the "Three Flavours Cornetto" or the "Blood and Ice Cream" Trilogy. That trilogy has now been completed with the release of The World's End, in which Wright, Pegg and many of their usual cohorts (in particular, Nick Frost) pay homage this time to the science-fiction genre. Yet it's another hybrid tale, which draws on a classic Gothic/horror sci-fi trope - body-snatching and mind control. In The World's End a group of friends reunite and try to complete the pub crawl they first attempted as teenagers twenty years before, the culmination of which is the apocalyptic-sounding "World's End" pub, only to discover that their home town has been overtaken by alien-controlled robots. Like the teenage versions of the protagonists who never made it all the way to the "World's End", then, I may never have completed the original review, but like the grown-up versions of those protagonists, it's time - at last - to finish what I started.

From their first collaborations for television on Asylum (1997) and Spaced (1999-2001) to their now-complete cinematic trilogy (Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007) and this year's The World's End), Wright and Penn - along with a stable of regular co-stars - have gleefully pastiched and paid affectionate homage to a range of genres (also appearing in cameo roles in George A. Romero's Land of the Dead in 2005). The rom-zom-com of Shaun of the Dead may have been their most direct foray into the horror world, but across their body of work as a whole, Gothic/horror themes and tropes abound, beginning with the surreal Gothic setting of the show on which they first worked together. Directed and written by Wright but co-written by David Walliams, and first screened on Paramount Comedy Channel in 1997, Asylum was loosely centred on the false imprisonment of a hapless pizza delivery boy (Pegg) in the titular institution, which is run by authorities whose own sanity is constantly in question; his fellow inhabitants included future Mighty Boosh player Julien Barrett and Jessica Hynes née Stevenson. Next up was the stand-up/sketch show Is it Bill Bailey (1998), with Wright again on directorial duties and Pegg as one of the featured actors, but things really took off with Spaced, with Pegg and Hynes as co-writers and co-stars. Over the course of its two series, Spaced openly referenced Gothic/horror texts throughout - most obviously in the sequence in which a strung-out and hallucinating Tim (Pegg) envisions himself fighting zombie hordes while playing Resident Evil (a sequence which famously provided the impetus for Shaun in the first place).

But there were other nods - in the establishing shot of the house in which much of the show takes place (which clearly recalled the Bates Motel in Hitchcock's Psycho [1960]); in the repressed memories and flashbacks that haunt several of the main characters; and in sight gags and parodies galore, which included references to The Shining (1980), The Omen (1976), The Sixth Sense (1999), and both Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987). And Hot Fuzz, in which uptight policeman Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is sent to the sleepy rural location of Sandford where he uncovers the dark secrets that lurk beneath the idyllic "Village of the Year", may have presented itself as a paean to action cinema, but it owed as much to The Wicker Man (1973) as it did to Bad Boys II (2003). It also boasted a slasher-subplot that at times referenced famous horror-movie deaths (in particular in one churchyard death that clearly recalled The Omen). These links seemed to be further underlined by the fact that horror icons such as Edward Woodward and Billie Whitelaw were cast in supporting roles. Unsurprisingly, then, The World's End turns its comedic eye to another hybrid form with Gothic/horror undertones - a dystopian science-fiction tale about conformity and apocalypse on both a personal and global scale.

As The World's End opens, Gary King (Pegg) sits in a group therapy session, reminiscing about the failed attempt to complete the pub-crawl known as the "Golden Mile" that he and his teenage friends made on the night that they finished school. Soon, he sets about getting the gang back together - Oliver (Martin Freeman), Peter (Eddie Marsden), Steven (Paddy Considine) and Andrew (Nick Frost). All have now grown up and grown apart from Gary's man-child, having tired of his ways and irresponsibility years before (in particular Frost's character), but reluctantly make their way back to Newton Haven for the ill-fated reunion. Along the way, they also bump into Oliver's sister Sam (Rosamund Pike), the object of both Gary's and Steven's teenage (and continued) lust. The early scenes of this awkward reunion establish the radically altered nature of the friendships involved, and the various attitudes that each man has developed in the process of growing older - Gary seeing his friends settling into mundane middle-aged, middle-England lives, them seeing him as deluded in his refusal to do so. The town, too, has changed, its collection of generic pubs and public spaces anticipating the broader and more overtly sinister type of conformity to which its inhabitants have succumbed, at the hands of the alien force that now controls the town - and which Gary King and co must attempt to evade.

In depicting Newton Haven as a homogenised space, The World's End echoes themes that recur also within Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. In the former, a zombie outbreak initially goes unnoticed because the zombies don't actually look or act all that differently from a "normal" population so subdued and deadened by the routines of modern life that they fail to notice what's going on around them (and by the end of the film, the survivors will have settled back down into a modified version of this pre-zombie "normal" life). Hot Fuzz boasts a (both literal and figurative) Model Village, and a Neighbourhood Watch Alliance that goes to murderous lengths to maintain Sandford's "Village of the Year" status - cleansing the streets of jugglers, living statues, hoodies and anyone else who fails to conform (or who stumbles upon their plot) "for the greater good". In different ways, too, the earlier films engage with ideas about growing up, and settling down, most clearly in the case in Shaun of the Dead. Whereas Shaun starts the film faced with choosing between a life with his slacker best friend Ed (Frost) or his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield), who wants him to wise up and commit to her, in the end he's allowed both (keeping the now-zombie Ed chained up in the garden shed, permanently on-call to play computer games). In The World's End, we seem to encounter older, more extreme versions of these characters, but with the situations apparently reversed - Frost as the "sensible" one who has accepted responsibility and Pegg as the ne'er-do-well, a man so hell-bent on getting his old friends to go along with his plans that he dupes them into believing that he's just lost his mother to cancer, and thus merits their sympathy and support.

Gary's insistence on completing the "Golden Mile" drives the narrative - but it turns out that it is a different kind of failed attempt entirely that has compelled him to do so (remember the film opens with Gary in therapy). By reassembling his old friends and attempting to complete what he sees as unfinished business, he is not just attempting to recapture past glories - he is also attempting to establish some kind of purpose in his life. The scene in which this becomes apparent - and in which Andrew and Gary both realise the secrets that each has been concealing from the other - gives rise to one of those genuinely affecting moments that this collection of films (and Spaced too) have always done so well, amidst all the pastiche, homage and frenetic camera-work. It still brings a tear to my eye when Mike (Frost) sacrifices himself in a game of 'Nam-inspired paintball and "dies" in Spaced; or when Shaun and his step-dad Philip (Bill Nighy) share a brief moment of connection before the latter succumbs to a zombie bite. And don't get me started on what happens with Shaun's mum Barbara, played by Penelope Wilton, or Shaun's plaintive "I don't know if I have it in me to shoot my mum, my flat-mate and my girlfriend all in the same evening".

Inevitably, the latest film will send fans back to the earlier texts, just as I've done here, to find the kinds of self-referential links and echoes across all three that might be expected - the running gag (amended on each occasion) in which Pegg jumps a backyard fence; the cameos from familiar faces; the reverence paid to the local pub as a site of security and camaraderie. There's always the danger that this might turn into self-indulgence, but here it seems to serve a thematic purpose, and is in keeping with Gary's own insistence throughout on looking back. To some extent, the main character himself embodies the very idea of self-indulgence, because of his apparently relentless insistence on clinging to past glories and perceived refusal to grow up. But despite Gary's initial abrasiveness and bull-headed insistence on pursuing his quest, the film doesn't damn him, not least because it's his actions that manage to expose the extent of the conformity-horror that has taken hold. Nor, I think, does it join him in wallowing too much in an attempt to recapture past glories at the expense of moving on.

***SPOILER BEGINS*** Crucially, when Gary is faced with the option of succumbing to the aliens' plans, and is actually given the chance to be remodelled as a robotic version of the youth that he has glorified all along, he ultimately declines. In doing so, he refuses to conform, but is also allowed to accept that he has grown older without having to follow the various routes his school-friends have taken. The film ultimately resolves itself (in a well-observed and brilliantly realised coda) by allowing each of its characters to revert to the paths they had chosen in life (albeit modified for a post-apocalyptic world), suggesting that each lifestyle choice is, in the end, valid, and each brings with it its own rewards and challenges. Admittedly, a couple of them have been turned into robots by the end, but they're still in a position to resume (and rebuild) the lives they had been living previously, reintegrating into a post-apocalyptic society in which the lines between the "blanks" (as they're called) and the norms is not actually all that clear-cut. Rather than seeing this as a scathing indictment of dull, conformist middle-aged life and an all-out endorsement of Gary King's ideals, though, it seems to me that it suggests something more balanced, and potentially more bittersweet. In their own ways, each - Gary included - has chosen to conform to a particular set of ideals on their way to adulthood and middle age; and each of them is tasked now with at least recognising (and possibly accepting) the ways in which old friends may choose a different way of going about their lives, whether that is as (relatively) contented father and family man; corporate high-roller; or aging Goth. Gary is allowed retain this identity, then, still defining himself in terms of his past, teenage self in the closing scenes, and reasserting his role as the leader of a new gang - the robot versions of his old school-friends that have survived the climactic apocalypse. But there are also indications that he's learned a thing or two. Early in the film, for example, he had scorned Andrew's sobriety (telling him that King Arthur didn't order waters at Camelot after winning the Battle of Hastings), but by the end, Gary King can walk into a pub and order five glasses of water. ***SPOILER ENDS***

In clinging to the past, Gary has actually been struggling to maintain a sense of identity, and the film ultimately rewards him with one. In the end, it seems, there is only one Gary King, but he does prove capable of change. By sticking with him to the bitter (or lager) end, The World's End brings about a resolution that is both satisfying and cathartic. What's more, it even grants him a memorable and strangely appropriate romantic sign-off to Sam, with whom he once shared a passionate teenage clinch in a disabled toilet in one of the pubs on the "Golden Mile" - as he wistfully tells her, "We'll always have the disableds".

There is something of an elegiac tone to all of this at times - the sense of an ending - and whereas Spaced, Shaun and Hot Fuzz all ended with reunions, this one starts with a reunion and (without giving too much away) ends with the characters apart again. In this, it parallels the filmmakers' own recent career trajectories. The World's End reunites them at a point at which each has already completed several separate projects - Wright with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) and the forthcoming Ant-Man (currently scheduled for release in 2015), Pegg as key player in two movie franchises (Mission Impossible and Star Trek), and as co-writer and co-star (with Frost) of Paul (2011). Gary's backward glance, then, is also the film's, and it seems significant that it begins in the same location as the first onscreen collaboration between Wright and Pegg (in an "asylum"), and ends with the characters poised to move on to new things.

But ultimately, The World's End is as much about beginnings as endings. The film may close, to some extent, at a new beginning, but it remains to be seen if it will give way to new collaborations between Wright, Penn and company. For now, though, happily, it's enough that they've brought this trilogy to a satisfying conclusion. And while it may be giving away too much to say that this is a film that briefly envisions a world without Cornettos - a horrifying prospect indeed - at least we'll always have the Cornetto trilogy.

Jenny McDonnell