The World’s End by Edgar Wright

The World’s End by Edgar Wright


The Cornetto trilogy is a trilogy in name only. As far as I can see, the chief link between Shaun of the DeadHot Fuzz and The World’s End is Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Edgar Wright and the fact that they are all stories about friendships between men. There’s nothing in The World’s End‘s story or theme that forces any finality or closure.

The core story between the five friends dealing with being forty was compelling and heartfelt. It’s nice seeing Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan play bigger roles in a commercial film and a fresh turn seeing Nick Frost playing the most competent character. The story with Simon Pegg’s Gary King is genuinely the darkest and saddest territory these films have ever ventured.

When the genre stuff kicks in, it was quite the surprise. The first time around I couldn’t tell how exactly the core story about the five friends fit with the sci-fi genre elements that cut in the middle. The film simply operates too much on a thematic level. For example, the fact that the twelve bars they visit are all thematically named after points in the story seemed more on the nose than ironical. The humor itself is less blatant than in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz; it’s more akin to laughing at the thematic irony of the situation rather than laughing at funny zingers. It is all very clever stuff, but it may take multiple viewings to really digest its heavy ideas along with its spectacle. I had to watch it again before writing this review.

Now admittedly, out of all the three films, I knew least about the films that The World’s End is referencing. Audiences familiar with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter films will probably have a different experience than me. But at the end of day, science fiction or not, watching five men on a pub crawl just isn’t as cinematic as a zombie outbreak or a midday gun battle.

The fight choreography, although they are drunk bar fights, have a nice martial arts rhythm to them. It seemingly is an aesthetic Wright has brought from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. They were visually theatrical and matched the film’s ironic tone.

I take issue with the epilogue as the story ended on a rather cold morbid note that seemed mean to its characters. If only The World’s End was the second installment in the Cornetto trilogy, it would have relieved itself from following up on the more comical light-hearted expectations from Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, I probably would have liked it more as the darker second installment of the trilogy. That said, it’s dense and the film probably will grow on me with subsequent viewings.