Sunday Review: The World's End

With both a bang and a whimper

By Jonathan Price

The World’s End (2013, directed by Edgar Wright) is really two films, a kind of British version of The Hangover (2009, with sequels in 2011 and 2013), and a remake of the already once-remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, remade in 1978). Put thus baldly, it hardly seems that those two combined could make a single film, but the film manages to hold it all together by having a single plot narrative that takes five aging British males back to their hometown to recreate the Golden Mile, a pub crawl (12 pubs, 12 pints) they never quite finished at the end of high school. The first part of the film, with its reconsideration of adulthood growth and loss, is the funnier and more interesting. Nevertheless, the filmmaker’s original idea incorporated the second strand—that of returning home to the strangeness of homogenized village England, where all the pubs are nearly identical—which became the template for the science fiction part of the film.
    The five have long since parted company since being 18, and found different life paths: car salesman, real estate agent, contractor, lawyer, and Gary King. You might notice, despite the British locale, that King is not a life path, which is of course part of the plot and part of the problem. King was the king of the group, now the loser, lost in direction and life, realizing in group therapy in an institutional setting that his greatest moment occurred long ago in the epic drunk he and his friends launched 20 years before. By deception and enticement he convinces his aging friends, all since transported from the small town of Newton Haven to London, to join him in another misshapen adventure, even going to the extent of (verbally) killing off his aging mother to win sympathy from the most reluctant, an alienated, distant, plump and aging teetotaler. As you might predict, Andy the teetotaler begins by ordering only a pint of water, but eventually succumbs under the pressures of the crawl and its attendant aliens to downing five shots of whisky in a row and becoming the most belligerent and aggressive of the pentagroup. We also learn, as the pubs accumulate and the conversation wanders, that two were in love with Sam, a friend’s sister, who miraculously also arrives to periodically join the pub crawl.
    The musical accompaniment, beginning with a long-lost tape still in King’s decaying car, the Beast, is quite original and eventually varies to include a comic march from Weill and Brecht covered by The Doors, a clue to the sophistication and electicism of the filmmakers. Even if this film is a kind of failure, it shows a great deal of promise. Like the sound track of 90s songs, the title of each pub is a clue to a point on the crawl’s pilgrim’s progress.

The trouble with a 12-pub, 12-pint crawl, is that eventually it becomes even more sodden, more rambling, and more repetitious. There is a folkloric contention among screenwriters that at some point, usually midway, every script “hits the wall.” That is, after an original conception and development that seems promising, witty, imaginative, entertaining, it somehow loses focus and questions direction and has no idea where to go—it hits the wall. Good films emerge when writers discover a plausible exit and development plan that emerges from this event. Other films, to those perceptive and attuned to the issue, appear to disintegrate or fail just at this point.
    Having created some intriguing characters with genuine life problems and even a bit of wit and intrigue (the quadrangle of two suitors, one brother, one sister for example), the film decides the only way to provide direction is to populate the succeeding pubs with plausible townspeople, suitably dressed, and articulate and convincing enough, who turn out to be replacement robots for those left behind by the fabulous five. There is even a discussion of the etymology of the word robot (not once, but three times), which, according to the film means “slave.” (“Robot” was first used in the 1920s Karel Čapek play RUR.)

    The robots here, though seemingly strong, wrestle the real humans forcefully, but can be defeated by pulling off their heads, only to reveal blue stumps, bleeding ink; this decapitation also is the key strategy to tell robot from authentic friend. The ultimate theme of this plot sequence as well as of the Body Snatchers films is the modernist fear of identity loss, which is after all the fear that the five have anyway, that they have given up their best selves and retreated into the mediocrity and generalized dissatisfaction of middle-class life and middle age. But the robotization is also a hallmark of what the film repeatedly labels “Starbuckization,” where all commercial establishments have been homogenized, made to feel falsely homey. The manic lostness of King, the leader, is merely replicated in the others who, when pushed, reveal the loneliness and suffering of their apparently successful lives. At this point the film gets lost in the plot sequence of the plans of the Network, the vague extraterrestrial power that launches the robots, presumably to make a better universe where everyone is happy; and it deteriorates into a series of futile battles—but ends, sort of, in a climactic scene in a subterranean courtroom bar where the five, two of whom have become robots, confront the voice of the Network, which proves indefensible against the irreverent irrationality of the inebriated.
    The Network just gives up!—the first alien power, apparently, to be defeated merely by words, those being the words of two drunken losers defending human independence and irrationality. The Network destroys itself and the remaining bar and apparently all of Newton Haven—there’s your bang—leaving the three to be saved by the female member. And this launches us into the dystopic epilogue, where some seem to live in a kind of truncated world, but others find a kind of life. Though this is intriguing, like the right turn the film takes when it goes to robotism, this doesn’t make much sense. It does, however, provide a new life for King, now the irreverent hero, apparently, of a resurgent rebel faction in England. The viewpoint has shifted dramatically—since the film began with a prologue from King’s point of view, flashing back to high school, but now we hear a voice-over by his antagonistic alter ego Andy Knightley. This film seems to have hit the wall, and gone on, but not to much effect.
_______________
Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

Please comment