The World's End

Wow, remember my last post? Holy crap did I just watch the utterly perfect movie to follow up that melancholy reflection on nostalgia and home towns.

The World's End is the third (and final? I kind of hope not) installment in the "Blood and Ice Cream" or "Three Flavours Cornetto" series, made by Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost (if you are a fan of the films, check out their late-90s TV show Spaced on Netflix, which admittedly has the look of a pre-millenial British TV show, but is otherwise fantastic, and has the same sort of humor. Also, you'll recognize a ton of the actors.)

Like the whole trilogy, this film deals with the issues of arrested development (and a community that seems like it's out to get you,) where the protagonist is clinging to his youthful life in the face of the greatest monster of all: adulthood. More than the previous two films, World's End really delves deep into the tragedy of growing up and seeing the life one remembers so fondly now faded and taken away.

Flipping the series' convention, Simon Pegg now plays the absurd engine of comedy, while Nick Frost is the best example of maturity. While Pegg is still clearly the protagonist, once again the story is about their relationship, this time set against a backdrop of an Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers-style alien take-over plot.

Pegg plays Gary King, who had at one time been the leader of a group of friends in the town of Newton Haven (see, it's even got nearly the same name as my hometown!) For reasons that are revealed later on, Gary has decided that he must now complete the epic pub crawl that he and his friends failed to complete when they were eighteen (which is the drinking age in the UK, in case that set off any kind of alarm for you.)

So, he gathers his friends Pete, Steven, Oliver, and finally Andy (Frost,) with whom he had a falling-out long ago. They attempt to recreate their pub-crawl, also encountering Oliver's sister Sam, who had been a mutual romantic interest of Gary's and Steven's (thankfully, this romantic plot does not overwhelm the film, though this does relegate Sam to "the girl" for much of the story.)

And then, after quite a long time (standard for the series,) we encounter the first truly strange moment, when a sudden brawl in a pub's bathroom reveals the presence of the paranormal.

The film is hilarious. The theater where I was watching was in a constant uproar of laughter. These are the same guys, after all, and they have not lost their groove. As other reviewers have pointed out, the justification for continuing the pub-crawl in the middle of an alien invasion begins to erode, but that's part of the fun. While the film avoids being truly escapist due to the actually quite serious problems Gary has been dealing with, it's still about fun and action. And shockingly, after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, not at all gory (unless you count breaking robots.)

Being an Edgar Wright film, this has an absurd number of clever visual puns and motifs, and the script is, again as usual, a triumph of the set-up/call-back. It's the sort of thing that makes a screenwriting student utterly nerd-out.

But more importantly, I think that amidst the craziness, it's saying something true about nostalgia and the pain and loss that comes with becoming an adult. Let's hope this is not the Spaced/Cornetto team's way of saying they're hanging up their collective hat, but if it is, this was a worthy way to take a final bow.