So Young, So Gone; The World's End (Again)

A little over a week on, and something's still bothering me about The World's End.

What's more annoying is that I cannot work out exactly what it is.

If you want to take away a positive from this, no other film has had me still thinking about it a week later.

(Compare, for instance, Pacific Rim, which I saw as part of a double-bill after The World's End. The closest thing I can describe my feelings about Pacific Rim to is anhedonia, which is not what I wanted to walk away from a film about giant mechs beating up giant monsters from. This is, however, something for another column.)

I can (hopefully) break down what's bothering me about The World's End into component parts. 

Let's put up that spoiler warning again. 

SPOILERS! 

(Really)

(1) Being a Townie 

I have no problem admitting that I'm a townie, through and through. I was born and raised in West Philadelphia a small town in the home counties where fuck all ever happened. It was quiet, it was suburban, and these things, while not necessarily derogatory, are not necessarily good, either. 

My particular small town was... Here's the point. The World's End is, at its' heart, about 'Starbucking', i.e. the corporatisation of individual personal experience and the removal of independent shops in favour of chains. This joke is two-layered in The World's End; not only are the first two pubs exactly the same (for comic relief) but it's what The Network are trying to do to Earth as a whole; bring us up to a level where we fit in with the galaxy as a whole, but by removing our pesky free will. 

I travel through my home town on a regular basis. (I try not to stop.) It's survived Starbucking relatively well - there's a corporate coffee shop, but other than that, it's fairly... normal. 

It feels a lot like the film is amazingly culturally specific to the experience of being a Townie, though. If you're from a city, you might not get it; if you're from a village, you might have a closer idea, but it's still... Hard to describe. If you're a townie, you're either, in basic terms, anonymous, or renowned. The anonymous are the people who work and live and do the whole live thing in the background; they're not too worried about what people think of them, other than being English enough to care what the neighbours think. 

The renowned, of course, are the people the anonymous talk about. They're the ones that everyone knows, that have a reputation, that do the things that get them the reputation. 

The World's End is about, basically, Gary King realising that where he once was known by everyone, he's now nothing to nobody (except the pub that remembers him well enough to bar him again, all these years later.) It's that fatal problem of trying to recapture the feeling, somehow, that you can 'own' a time and place by being well-known enough and being the name on everybody's lips for whatever reason, good or bad. 

This isn't really going anywhere deep or specific - shocker - but it's very strange to see the Townie Experience - tonight at the Dublin Castle, £7 before 9, £8 after - writ large on the cinema screen. Towns aren't good things. Towns are prisons where there's only so much to do and if you do it, you're being watched by everyone else that's doing it, if that makes sense; as in, if you're The One Who Drinks Ten Pints, Gets In Fights and Falls Over, then that's your reputation, job done. It's a way for people to judge you without even knowing you, so best make sure it's what you want to be judged as. 

I didn't like being a townie. I got the hell out as soon as I could and went to The City. This was a lot like fleeing a burning boat for a freezing liferaft, but hey, it was a change. 

(2) Catharsis and the lack thereof

Nobody in the film achieves any significant character development. 

This feels like a wanky point to press, but... It's true. Let's break it down; 

At the start of the film, Gary King is a self-obsessed case of arrested-development who wants to travel around pubs with four of his old friends. At the end of the film, Gary King is a self-obsessed case of arrested development who is travelling around pubs with age-frozen duplicates of his teenage friends. This is not a good thing. 

I accept that he wasn't going to have a road to Damascus moment, realise that he needed to change his ways, shave, buy a suit and get a proper job. That's obviously not going to happen, as it would be a betrayal of his character in the film. 

But he's literally doing a pub crawl with his teenage friends, finally able to recapture the spirit of what he was looking for all those years ago. 

Of course, his travelling companions' heads break like eggshells - bit of a hazard if you're picking bar fights - and he orders pints of water instead of beer, most likely because of how manly Andy made it seem earlier in the film (before he started drinking, but we'll come to that.) But Gary is fundamentally the same person he was at the start of the film, just with a new zest for living which... 

... Wait. Is that supposed to be it? We're still deep in spoiler territory, by the way, but the character arc of Gary is that he begins the film recovering from a suicide attempt. The only thing that has any meaning left is re-doing the pub crawl with his quote-unquote friends.

So is it the assumption that because he's now zesty, and happy, and travelling with his coterie of blanks, that that's his development? 

That he's no longer suicidal? 

That's... 

Anyway. 

Of the other characters, Andrew begins the film a successful lawyer (his name is on the door and everything) but without his family; he ends the film without his success but, crucially, reunited with his family. It's a trade-off in theory but not in practice, because the necessity of high-powered lawyers post-apocalypse is, at best, highly debatable. 

Oliver begins the film as an estate agent, and ends the film as an estate agent, albeit a Blank version of himself with no head. Peter begins it as a downtrodden family man and ends it as a downtrodden family man with removable hands to amuse the children. 

(Peter, at least, does attain some measure of catharsis by being able to take out his frustrations on a facsimile of his schoolyard bully, but it's because he does this rather than letting go that he's captured and made over into a Blank, so it's catharsis at the ultimate cost, really.) 

The only characters who sustain any real changes are Steven and Sam, who are together at the end after Steven was unable to tell Sam he loved her all those years ago, which is... A bit soap opera. Plus, they end up living in a shack. (I'm still annoyed about that bad 'shacking up' joke.) 

There's a standard formula for a character arc in a Hollywood - and, increasingly, otherwise or outside - film. It runs a little like this, and you can sing along if you know the words. 

(I) Character introduced as they are
(II) Shit happens 
(III) After shit happens, character changes. Character learns and grows as a person. Character develops. 

Character does not stay exactly the same, or, worse, re-enacting their youth. 

I'm going to mark this up in bold, however; it is not a bad thing for this not to happen. 

It's brave, in fact.  

It's also out-of-... Well, character - for the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy. 

At the end of Shaun of the Dead, Shaun has gone through harrowing circumstances, reconciled - to some measure - with his step-father, suffered the loss of his mother, but, at the end of it, he's come to understand what Liz is seeking from him, grown up as a person, and is better off for it. 

(Okay, so he keeps his zombie best friend in the shed to play Timesplitters 2 with. Then again, Ed was basically useless as a human, so at least this way he's having fun. Also, video games are for zombies. Subtle. Obviously, that's not the real message, but it's fun to believe it is.) 

At the end of Hot Fuzz, Nicholas has learned how to relax from Danny, and Danny has moved towards learning how to take things seriously from Nicholas. The world post-NWA is back to normal, and they're having fun. 

The World's End has not so much of this. The closest I can think of is Andrew's "I HATE THIS FUCKING TOWN!" pre-fight, and maybe Gary's breakdown into honesty when talking about his problems. But the ending breaks any prospect of 'things getting better'; in Shaun, the zombies were dealt with or 'integrated' into society; in Fuzz, normality is restored. 

In The World's End, everything's gone to absolute shit and there's no possibility of restoring it for a long, long time. (In theory, there's records of how the technology The Network brought worked, and it might be restored given time, but for now, it's all just-post-feudal. In fact, it's worse, because without the internet, there's no distributed knowledge.) 

It's just... Sadness. Bleakness and sadness. Which brings us handily to the third and final point, for now; 

(3) Bleakess and Sadness

Here's an interesting idea; 

Watch the film, but not as a comedy. 

If you watch it as a study... Wait. I just used the phrase if you watch it as a study unironically. 

Shit. 

If you watch it as a study of a broken man suffering from a deep depression with only one overriding goal in mind - get the friends back together and complete the bar crawl from twenty + years ago, no matter the cost, then it's an amazing film. I stand by one of the previous posts on The World's End in saying that Gary King is one of Simon Pegg's most amazing characters (and I've seen Big Nothing, so hey) and he's fascinating in that he's completely single-minded and driven for this one, truthful, goal. 

It's bleak, and it's sad. 

This must be why I'm still thinking about it, a week on. That, and obsessively listening to So Young by Suede... 

The End Of The (World's) End

So yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing The World's End. It was a pleasure, although I wasn't sure that would be the case going in. (Deep-seated issues? Selective Memory?) 

I want to talk more about the ending, though. 

This necessitates BIG TEXT: 

SPOILERS! 

(Yes, Really!)

So now you know. 

At the end of The World's End - and let's say it again, SPOILERS!, so, you're warned - the revelation is that an alien civilisation called The Network has infiltrated Earth at points across the globe. They're supposedly here to make life better - all our technological advances of at least the last twenty years are through them - and to elevate us to the right level to start interacting with other civilisations across the galaxy. 

This would be noble except for the fact that to infiltrate our society necessitates replacing entire populations with Blanks, which are essentially... Well, the definition is back-and-forthed throughout the film, because they're not robots, as robots are, by definition - repeatedly - slaves, but they're not human either. 

The best way I can describe them is that they're a codicil to the original human, and I wish I could tell you why the word codicil just popped into my head right there and then, because I don't think I've ever used it in conversation at any point, ever. I'd love to claim it's because I have a writers' brain, but I think someone stole the jar it was in a long time ago. 

It's not totally explained, basically. If you go along willingly and submit to the Network's process, you get a version of your body which is how you want it to be - younger, fitter, peak optimal. If you don't go willingly, you get replaced anyway, and the implication is that you become a true Blank - i.e. human form, but everything else is gone and you're just a... Wait, this may be irony... slave. So you have a choice between Amended Human agent and Blank slave. Well, I say choice... 

This is horrific enough in itself, until what happens to the original human bodies - and, as Basil says (repeatedly), you shouldn't ask about that (I'm paraphrasing) - in that the original bodies are... 

Well...

... Mulched. 

So in order to elevate us onto the galactic stage, the Network kill entire population centres (and Newton Haven is said to have something like, I think, 110,000 people?), turn the bodies into compost, and replace them with one of two sorts of agents. 

This is all fridge horror, by the way, in that it's all explained in a whip-crack section of dialogue at the end between the survivors and the voice of the Network, so there's not really much time to stop and digest what the implications are. (At one point Gary smartly asks the question of whether the other sites the Network has on Earth are going as well as Newton Haven, poking holes in their logic and apparent desire to make humanity better whether it likes it or not.) 

This isn't the problematic ending, though. It works really well in context - Gary King, defender of humanity and free will through non-sequiturs and bolshiness, convinces a powerful alien entity to leave Earth because we just won't be helped - and it's whipcrack funny, too. 

The problem - at least, the problem to me - is what happens next. 

When the Network - or, at least the Network's representative - leaves, things go badly. 

Firstly, Newton Haven is destroyed in the resulting cataclysm - there's the classic outdriving-the-explosion sequence - and the town is consumed in crackling lightning and a wave of fire. 

Again, this is a traditional ending, which isn't a bad thing; bad guys defeated, big explosion, disestablished equilibrium makes way for establishment of new equilibrium, that sort of thing. No real problems here. 

But there's an epilogue. 

Nick Frost's Andrew - and apparently it's Andrew Knightly, whereas Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Martin Freeman only get characters with first names, but whatever - is sat around a campfire, telling a group of people what happened next. The takeaway from this is that he's been telling the story of the film to these people, although I didn't make the connection at the time - lazy brain - and, in principle, it's to give the audience some closure. 

This is done by explaining that when the Network left, they took every technological advance from the last twenty-plus years or so with them, plunging the world into darkness and post-apocalyptic wastelandedness. This kind of implies that humanity were content to just let everything technological run without actually questioning how it did so, or analysing what was going on - but, then again, I don't know entirely how my computer or mobile phone works, and that doesn't stop it working. 

So humanity is free, and not being turned into compost and replaced with duplicates in the name of progress, but we're back to what looks like a post-Feudal society. What's more, the Blanks in the silo in Newton Haven actually survived the cataclysm - well, most of them, anyway. Except now they're trying to integrate into human society. It's not going well. 

The main characters get arguably decent closure explanation endings, though; Andrew reunited with his family to make a go of it. Sam and Steven got together, properly - but that shacking up joke... really? As for Peter and Oliver, they're trying to make a go of it as blanks, except that nothing's really changed in doing so - Oliver's trying to be exactly what he was as a human, except with a replacement head, and Peter... Nothing's actually changed for Peter, as much as I could tell, except now he does funny tricks for his children with his removable body parts. 

And Gary King... 

... Here's where the problem is. So far, it's cosy catastrophe territory. Things have happened, a new normal has been established, and everyone's just trying to get on with it. 

Except for Gary. 

Gary is a fascinating character. I'd go as far as to say that he's Pegg's magnum opus, in that he's someone any sane and right-thinking person wants to punch after about twenty minutes, but he's still likeable over and above that. His energy, irrepressible nature, etcetera - sure, they all spring from his state of arrested development and lack of evolution as a person, but they still work on the level of animal cunning and the total charm offensive. (Which would be a good name for a band.)

Gary King is That Guy From School who hasn't actually changed at all, for whatever reason. Failure to engage with and be a part of the world, dislike of the idea of growing older - whatever, he is who he is, or, more accurately, he is who he was and wants to remain that way. It's because of this that he's able to convince The Network and their crazy mulch-and-replace program to leave the planet, and he saves the day for humanity in doing so. 

All well and good. 

Except that in the post-Network Britain, Gary's shown to have reunited with the teenage Blank versions of his friends (having killed his own teenage duplicate before the Network pulled out). This is... I don't like to say creepy, exactly, but it's a little odd; it's difficult to pull apart to write about, because Gary's still in the same psychological state he was when he left school, except that he now has his four friends back in the physical state they were in at the time and they are, in theory, the same psychologically. 

Gary's taking these Blank Friends around into the post-Feudal pubs and challenging their No Blanks policy by starting fights. 

This appears to be the sum of the ending. After all that's happened, Gary's still on a pub crawl with teenage versions of his friends, except that now he orders pints of water and starts fights. (Never mind that his Blank friends are one sharp punch away from having no face, thanks to the relative eggshell thickness of the Blank skull shown within the film). 

In theory, there's something positive to take away from this - Gary's doing what he's always wanted to, recapturing those teenage years, doing the things that made him happy, living his memories. But it's also a bit sad, in a way, because all that living in the past had got Gary before was, well, a failed suicide attempt and an unshakable desire to finish a legendary pub crawl. 

There's no progression, see? Even the Blank Adult versions of Peter and Oliver get a 'happy' ending, and so does Andrew. But Gary's become essentially a nomad in a state of arrested development. Which begs the question... 

What's the point of that ending? 

Gary doesn't change because Gary King doesn't want to change. Is it folly to have expected something along the lines of progression or character development or realisation or evolution? This is not to say that I can think of a better ending in the context of the epilogue - Gary does get everything he wants, truly, so what's better than that? 

The thing is... I'm not a great filmmaker, or writer, and I covered this yesterday, but... 

Why not just end it with the destruction of Newton Haven? 

The answer is, simply, structure. 

Shaun of the Dead could have ended with the army arriving, cut to black, credits, wham. Hot Fuzz could have ended without some of the final scenes in the police station (although, of course, you'd still have to have shown the final fate of Danny.) 

But Shaun finishes with an explanation of Ed's fate, and Fuzz finishes with a tying up of threads and an explanation of Danny's fate. This time, it's Andrew explaining Gary's fate, and it fits both structurally within the way the films work and, taken in the larger structure, within ending the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy; it's an ending to all three films, not just The World's End. 

I understand this. And in a way, it's the cinema equivalent of how Angel ended; running towards the next fight, "I kinda wanna slay the dragon", and this is no bad thing. 

In the context of the film itself, however... It's a little odd. 

Then again, maybe it's just me. 

"Can I not be the comic relief this time?"

So... 

I've seen The World's End. 

It turns out that midday matinees are about as popular as I remember them to be. No, seriously; because normal people have jobs and responsibilities and whatnot, I think I could have counted the number of people in the cinema on my two hands, maybe using a foot for the difficult calculations. 

This is how I like it. I'm an antisocial bastard, but it's a simple equation; the more people in a cinema, the more chances there are that someone will do something irritating. (Smartphone users, I'm looking at you.) 

I went in expecting not to really like the film. I went in out of misplaced loyalty because I loved Shaun of the Dead and liked Hot Fuzz. But something felt... I don't know, 'off' about things; is it Simon Pegg's meteoric - and quite possibly well-deserved - rise to A-list stardom? Ditto Edgar Wright, although Scott Pilgrim was not universally loved at the box office? When I say 'off', I mean that it's strange to see this reunion given the increase in wattage of at least two thirds of the trifecta - and Nick Frost hasn't exactly been too shabby, either.

So you have this group of on-the-ups high wattage people reuniting to do what is, in essence, something in the same thread as Shaun of the Dead, except with a bigger budget - although I can't justify that factually, as my web-fu is failing me, but it's probably not an unfounded assumption. 

It would be so easy for the elements not to mesh, or for something to feel out of place. 

I was surprised - pleasantly - to actually enjoy the film. It's chasing the same buzz of something weirdly cool, truly, trying to feel the same kind of epic that Shaun of the Dead did in sliding from romantic comedy to zombie film in a single seamless tonal shift; in this case, it's reunion comedy shifting to alien invasion, and it's actually arguably more seamlessly done than Shaun; it just sort of happens, without any particular warning. 

The pacing felt a little weird now and then until I realised it was driven entirely by the central character's obsessive needs, and then it made sense. The dialogue, too, is just crackly with sounding like how people actually talk to each other, especially people who were close a long time ago but haven't seen each other; the past is still there, and they still have the same kind of underlying 'love' for each other, and it takes so little for them to just access that kind of thing and start bickering and sniping and back-and-forthing; it's delightful dialogue, in a nutshell. 

It's also kind of refreshing to see that, at some point, Nick Frost asked not to be the Comic Relief, delegating the role entirely to Pegg; Frost is kind of revelatory as 'just a normal bloke badly irritated with the alien invasion'. He's serious, he doesn't really take any shit; he's Not Ed/Danny, in other words. Which is nice. 

One thing, though, and judge this for yourself; for me, the epilogue was completely unnecessary. God knows I'm no director, or decent writer, or in any major position to comment - I'm just someone on a desert island, throwing little blog posts out in bottles that occasionally people see - but the ending/epilogue/explanation was kind of... Odd. 

After THE BIG THING HAPPENS, there's this long-ish explanation of what happened next. It looks, in point of fact, like it was relatively expensive to film and ups the production values and feels, to me, pointless; after THE BIG THING HAPPENS, I expected a breather moment, a quip, then credits - and maybe in the credits, vignettes of post BIG THING life. 

Instead, epilogue. 

Oh well. Maybe I'm just missing the true relevance of Explaining What Happened Next... 

I guess if it were Trickeration he'd just X me out

I finally - after all these years, finally- got around to actually sitting down and watching Pitch Black.

 

It's one of those films that was always around when I was younger and at university for the first time. It had cachet; low-budget but good science fiction films were not exactly in premium supply back then. 

So there was always a video or - gasp - a DVD - lying around the shitty shared houses and bedsits I was living in, or it was always on Channel 4 (or 5) late at night. I think I must have watched it four times in pieces but never actually sat down and watched it from beginning to end before. 

(This has happened with a few films, I confess.) 

Having bought it for the princely sum of £1, though, I finally sat down and watched it from beginning to end, and enjoyed it immensely. 

I have a thing about Breaking Bad. It's good television, to be sure; expertly filmed, beautifully written. It's as good as people say it is. I don't go for it, however, because everyone in the show is an arsehole. I know this is probably the same as in real life - I'm a doe-eyed optimist, of course, and like to believe this is probably not true, but it probably provably is - but there isn't one single character in the show who's not unbelievably arseholic. Jesse is the nearest thing to sympathetic, and that's because he alternates between pitiable and powerful. Gus is perhaps the next along the line, but for all the good reasons he has for doing the things he does, he's still willing to do bad things for bad reasons, and does so, repeatedly. Hank is only that much less of an arsehole after he starts to deal with his PTSD and engages with his physical therapy. 

I don't quite get the appeal of watching a show where everyone starts out as irritating bastards and they only get worse. Granted, I've only seen the first four seasons, so maybe the fifth is a magical land of forgiveness and happiness and everyone gets what they want, plus a cake. But still. 

Maybe I just don't get the appeal. 

This is by contrast with Pitch Black, where only the bastards survive. 

Seriously; if you're anything other than a utilitarian hardcore bastard (or, to be fair, if you cross Riddick, which would just make you a stupid bastard) then, well, you die. 

The characters seem oddly fresh, too, thirteen years on; this is probably just my take on it, but this felt like one of the first times the Everybody Has Problems trope in filmmaking really worked. Nav-Officer slash Commander who heroically lands the ship? Yeah, she tried to jettison everyone in the cryogenic pods so she could survive. Security officer? A mercenary with a secret morphine addiction who justifies it by comparing it to coffee. Anyone who's a normative hero isn't; anyone who's just trying to survive is normative. 

There's also a sad judgment to be made about how Pitch Black, pre-9/11, was able to have an Imam with Muslim followers, representing the Religious People In Space subtrope. It's a little sad, and a little strange, watching this twelve years on, because it's religion in science fiction - something that doesn't necessarily happen quite so much these days. (I'd bring up the example of Shepherd Book from Firefly/Serenity, though. It does happen; just not quite so much.) 

Pitch Black, however, does have one of my favourite rack focuses in film. 

Early on - and spoilers, although the film's thirteen years old, so whaddayagonnado? - the survivors accidentally shoot another survivor who had only just woken up and didn't know about the crash, the circumstances, etcetera. He wanders up to ask some questions and blam, dead, hysteria moment. Everyone freaks, panics, but the camera remains still as they leave the frame, only to change focus; and there in the distance is Riddick, on a sun-lounger on top of a ship, having a nice drink and just relaxing. 

Comedy like that is why film can do things other mediums can't. Maybe. But it made my day...