“You can’t go home again.” It’s an expression meant to convey the futile attempt of trying to find emotional solace by returning to the place you once lived because, inevitably, it’s not that place anymore. Your old haunts become unrecognizable, neighbors and acquaintances move on with their lives or leave altogether, and the entire feel and texture of the town seem feigned, like a wholly different place masquerading as the setting that was once your home. But it’s you that’s changed too. The physical location could stay exactly the same and it’s still likely you wouldn’t find it quite the same—you’ve gotten older, your priorities are different, you have a family and a job, you’ve built out an entirely new life in your adulthood. You’re an entirely different person.
That is, unless you’re Gary King. The protagonist of The World’s End, the final entry in Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy, seemingly hasn’t changed a bit. He’s the same old reckless 17-year-old kid, trapped within the body of a 40-year-old. Played by Pegg, he wears the same Sisters of Mercy T-shirt, has the same greasy dyed-black hair, and fantasizes about the same night from over 20 years ago: An unsuccessful attempt by him and his shithead high school buddies (the adult versions of which are played by Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, and Eddie Marsan) to complete The Golden Mile, a raucous 12-location pub crawl in their hometown of Newton Haven.
Now in rehab, estranged from his friends and generally unsuccessful, Gary latches onto the idea that maybe you actually can go home again, and perhaps getting the gang together to finish out that fateful night would bring some sort of sense to his world. His myopic, self-destructive worldview will be the catalyst for his own self-actualization, but it’s also going to take the intervention of his friends, an alien robot invasion, and perhaps even the end of the civilized world. Through this, The World’s End becomes the most emotionally mature and resonant of any of Wright’s films, an existential crisis from an efficient purveyor of vibrant cinematic style. Ten years on, it continues to be his best movie.
Whereas the previous entries of this loosely-connected series had their outlines heavily defined by parody and homage, The World’s End finds its own distinct groove as the entry that isn’t indebted to one obvious filmmaker or genre in particular. The initial film Shaun of the Dead managed to carve out its own sense of identity outside the obvious joke of its title by taking a wry sense of humor, visual wit and potent emotion, and merging them with the sense of bleak, encroaching dread that defined the films of zombie master George Romero. Hot Fuzz is perhaps the most outright caricatural of the three, as well as the most exhaustively funny and gag-filled, its buddy-cop narrative in constant conversation with the likes of murder-mystery storytellers such as Agatha Christie and bombastic action-filmmaking auteurs like Michael Bay and Tony Scott.
Each of these films is a genre exercise, and after stretching their chops in horror and action, The World’s End finds the filmmaking team working in the realm of sci-fi, but without the same specific reference points. Of course, Wright is notorious for having his own voracious appetite for film, and his projects are always partially assembled out of love for his biggest influences—not to mention the plot here is something of a paean to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But, after directing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (based on the series of graphic novels), this is his first film that feels entirely his own, which would continue with follow-ups Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho (though the latter is very obviously an ode to the Italian giallos of the ‘70s). But what’s especially salient about The World’s End is how long it takes to make its turn into genre, and how it allows the extended first half of the film, which is exclusively about friendship, aging and gentrification, to inform the back half in which it’s revealed that the small town of Newton Haven has been taken over by (literally) blue-blooded, homogenized androids, all part of a larger alien operation from an entity known as The Network.
The Network represents a larger thematic thread that’s introduced early in the film when the group finds that the old pubs they once frequented are unrecognizable as they once knew them and far too recognizable between one another, as they’ve been bought out by chains that proceeded to suck out any sense of distinction or personality. As Considine’s Steven points out: “Starbucking, man. It’s happening everywhere.” The Network’s invasion of Newton Haven manifests this corporatization of small-town institutions writ large, as an entire town has fallen victim to an entity that sees Earth and humans as too uncivilized to coexist with other planets in the galaxy. There’s no better example of their argument than Gary King himself.
Part of the unexpected genius of The World’s End when compared to its predecessors is the flipping of the character archetypes that the two regular leads Pegg and Frost get to play. In Shaun and Fuzz, Frost is, broadly, more of the bumbling buffoon and emotional catalyst to Pegg’s straight man. Here, Pegg is still the top-billed main character, but he’s the grating and provoking presence to Frost’s Andy who, at this point in his life, wants nothing to do with Gary. When Gary makes the rounds between his friends at the beginning of the film to convince them to get back together, Gary pointedly goes to Andy last after assuring the rest of the crew that he’s already agreed to come, despite Andy no longer speaking to Gary after he caused a drug-spurred major medical accident for Andy in their teenage years. Typical of Gary, he seems to be willing the truth into existence. All it takes to get Andy on board are his sympathies after Gary tells him that his mother died—a little white lie worthwhile if it means Gary is allowed to live out the greatest night of his life once again.
Pegg and Frost are perfect in their switched-up personas, and each finds great emotional truth in their performances. Gary is often no less than an unscrupulous asshole, constantly manipulative of his friends’ feelings in order to get what he wants, perpetually emotionally stunted as the ultimate example of someone who peaked in high school. But he’s also a character of great tragedy, one beset by rampant alcoholism and driven by a yearning for the past and for his lost relationships with his friends. He’s a man terrified by the concept of change and aging. Meanwhile, Andy is ostensibly the well-adjusted one, working as a lawyer and with a family to take care of, whose own personal calamities come to light as the night presses on and everyone gets drunker and more unhinged.
Wright is well-equipped to balance all of the heavy thematics and trapped-in-the-town, night-of-survival antics that carry the surface-level narrative. His distinctive, energetic craft is on full display, and he once again offsets a formal sense that could come off as a sugar rush with a genuinely clever sense of humor and painstaking detail that coalesces into something sublime. The typical trademarks of the trilogy remain, with the dry wordplay, obvious-in-retrospect narrative foreshadowing, shrewd needle drops, quick editing, and recurring cast members. And Wright’s action filmmaking has never been sharper. The pub brawls are filmed in digitally-stitched long takes. The technique has become increasingly less imaginative and more obligatory in recent years, but here is choreographed full of dynamic, creative visual jokes informed by the personalities of each character, and they grow to create a gradual accumulation of chaos as the night drags on closer to the final pub: The World’s End.
The climactic scene within that pub is perhaps the single best in Wright’s whole filmography—the most potent synthesis of story, theme, craft and performance. It’s at a point where much more has been revealed about these characters than was initially let on. Andy, who was purportedly sober and only ordering water on the crawl at the irritation of Gary, has now taken down at least five shots and is raging drunk, indicating his own problems with setting aside alcohol. Gary has mysteriously refused to show his arm during a scene when the gang is attempting to ensure no one has been replaced by any “Blanks” (their nominal term for the robots, so-called because the person they’re replicating becomes a blank slate with any scars or body modification removed). With the entire town on their tail and as the only two that seem to have made it to this point alive, Gary is still hell-bent on getting that final pint—alien invasion be damned.
Before he can take that final drink, though, Andy shoves the glass out of his hands and the two get into an altercation, with Andy desperate to understand why Gary refuses to give this up. The histories of these characters bubble up to the surface, as years of silence and resentment are finally articulated within the very place Gary thought he would never reach. By the time the two have wrestled each other to the ground, Gary expresses his bitterness over Andy’s happiness, something he’s never been able to achieve, to which Andy reveals that his wife has left him and taken the kids with her. When Andy demands to know why Gary insists on finishing the Golden Mile, Gary’s response comes out with heart-rending agony and desperation: “It’s all I’ve got!” This is just before Andy finds Gary’s bandaged wrists and hospital ID bracelet, previously hidden under his trench coat.
Suddenly, Gary’s perpetual state of adolescent pining is ushered into sharp focus as a sorrowful character study of a depressed alcoholic, one who romanticizes the memories of his youth and yearns for the days when he and his friends ruled the world—one so stuck in that time period that he can’t actually become an adult alongside them. They’ve changed, the town has changed and Gary refuses to reconcile those realities. Andy tries to talk him down but he’s resolute in finishing the crawl, an act framed as utterly calamitous. He pulls the pump for his drink, but nothing releases. Instead, the floor of the pub descends underground, and Gary and Andy find themselves face-to-face with the glowing light of the head of The Network.
It’s here Gary finds his true potential. The Network goes down not with a physical fight, but with the pure indignation of Gary, Andy and, eventually, Steven, who manages to catch up, alive and well. The Network attempts to exploit Gary’s desire for youth and reveals the replicated teenage versions of him and his friends, which Gary violently rejects by tearing the head off of his younger counterpart because “There’s only one Gary King.”
The Network’s fatal flaw was in trying to tell a man like Gary what to do, and all three men revolt against The Network’s “Starbucking” of the human experience. The alien entity wishes for humans to reach their “full potential” by eliminating the mistakes of someone like Gary, without recognizing the ways in which humanity is defined by a cycle of mistakes and growth. Or, as Gary so eloquently puts it: “It’s our basic human right to be fuck ups.” The three men belligerently argue with The Network so profusely that it decides to just give up on the whole operation. “Fuck it,” the disembodied voice says dejectedly, and the lights shut off. A win for humanity.
The friends escape with the help of Rosamund Pike’s character Sam, but the defeat of The Network sends the world back into the dark ages. The last vestiges of society carry on, semblances of communities are formed, and the Blanks wake back up and are discriminated against. Andy sits over a fire telling a story about the end of the world and wonders about what ever happened to Gary, as the two got separated some time ago.
The audience receives an answer: He’s roaming the world as a neo-cowboy with the Blank versions of his friends, a band of misfits making their way through Armageddon. The crew makes their way to a makeshift pub, where Gary orders five glasses of water, and the bartender refuses to serve his robot acquaintances. You can see the glee in Gary’s eyes as he knows he’s about to have to fight for the very thing he mocked Andy for previously. He faced annihilation, burned his old life to the ground, and started anew—a man who willed himself to change, who has a new purpose in the absence of alcohol. It’s the world’s end, but a brand new start for Gary. Somehow, he found his way home again. Hail to the King, indeed.
Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.