We can never truly go back home. Even if the places that shaped us haven’t changed all that much, we have changed as people, and there’s simply no way to catch the same lightning in a bottle. In 2013, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg joined forces yet again and fittingly capped off their beloved Cornetto trilogy with a story about getting the old gang back together. Of course, The World’s End also eventually blows up into rapid-fire action sequences involving snappy hand-to-hand combat with an army of alien body snatchers, but the theme of the futility in trying to recreate one’s salad days remains at the forefront throughout.
Gary King (Pegg) had the best night of his life two decades prior, when he and four of his young mates were fresh out of school and ready to take the world by storm. As part of their celebration, the group attempted to tackle a famed pub crawl route, knocking back a pint at each of a dozen pubs along the fictional town of Newton Haven’s “Golden Mile.” Plenty of drink, a bit of herbal enhancement and ensuing late-night shenanigans resulted in them abandoning their quest about three-quarters of the way through in order to watch the sun rise. The film opens with Gary recapping a night he knew would be his apex, a point from which life could never be as good again, and we see his exuberance turn to melancholy as it turns out he was detailing his glory days in front of an alcoholism support group. When asked whether it bothers him that he never actually finished the pub crawl at the 12th and final pub, the World’s End, Gary hatches a harebrained scheme to get his life back on track by taking one last stab at an epic night of debauchery.
Convincing his four old drinking buddies to join in is another story, though. Each has grown up in ways Gary never could, and they’re living successful (if not entirely fulfilling) lives: Oliver (Martin Freeman) has become a schmoozy real estate agent with a Bluetooth earpiece; the once-bullied Peter (Eddie Marsan) has been made partner at his father’s car dealership; and Gary’s romantic rival Steven (Paddy Considine) has become an architect. Gary twists their arms to get them back to Newton Haven on this misguided quest, but he has to outright lie about his mom dying to draw in his former best friend Andy (Nick Frost), a man who straightened up after a drunk driving accident and is now a 16-years-sober corporate lawyer.
The group goes through the motions of the pub crawl (with Andy only drinking pints of water), but they lack any real vigor for it. Mostly, they feel sorry for Gary and his sad attempts at reliving lost youth. Their old hometown feels different than what they remembered, due in large part to the various pubs’ corporate “Starbucking” by adopting more generic, universal décor. They bump into familiar faces, such as a former teacher (Pierce Brosnan), barfly Basil (David Bradley), their old weed dealer they call “The Reverend” (Michael Smiley) and Oliver’s sister Sam (Rosamund Pike), who both Gary and Steven have lusted over in the past. But even surrounded by the familiar, something else feels off, and it’s not just from viewing their hometown through the lens of two intervening decades of life experience.
When Gary gets into a restroom scuffle with a young man about the age that he was during his initial pub crawl, he discovers the Newton Haven’s populace has largely been swapped out for (literally) blue-blooded body snatchers with snap-on appendages. Turns out the best way to prevent the masses of interloping aliens—who try to convert people to their way of thinking peaceably and only body-snatch as a last resort—from knowing that the group is onto them is to continue along their epic pub crawl and either drink their way to the World’s End or to the end of the world.
In many ways, Gary is a more tragic extension of Pegg’s titular character in Shaun of the Dead, a slacker who never got his shit together and is running out of time to do so. Meanwhile, the serious, strait-laced Andy is the polar opposite of Frost’s character from that same film, and after his bumbling sidekick character in Hot Fuzz, it’s fun to see him in this film playing the responsible one of the group. At the end of Shaun, there’s a sense that true friendship will withstand even apocalyptic challenges, and there’s a hint of that here as well. But in The World’s End, there’s almost a celebration of ignorance that hasn’t aged all that well in this post-truth, anti-science era. As a disembodied beam of a light called the Network (voiced by Bill Nighy) explains to Gary and Andy, the aliens are trying to prepare humanity for transcendence, gifting them with rapid advances in information technology over the past decades. The Network points out that humans act out the same cycles of self-destruction again and again, but Gary and Andy drunkenly proclaim that it’s a basic human right to be “fuck-ups” and they take pride in being “more belligerent, more stubborn, and more idiotic” then the Network can possibly imagine. After all, as Gary puts it, “we are the human race, and we don’t like to be told what to do.” This played differently in 2013 than it does in the Covid era, when bucking public health measures is celebrated by some as an assertion of liberty. Against this backdrop, and amid a human-caused climate crisis, this roguish, willfully ignorant individualism may never have the same edgy appeal that it did in 2013’s The World’s End. Unfortunately for humanity, while we may long for simpler times, there’s simply no going back.
Photo courtesy of Focus Features
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