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
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...
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