| The World's End | |
| Director: | Edgar Wright |
| Music: | Steven Price |
| Cinematography: | Bill Pope |
| Editing: | Paul Machliss |
| Runtime: | 109 minutes[1] |
| Language: | English |
| Budget: | $20 million[2] |
| Gross: | $46.1 million[3] |
The World's End is a 2013 science fiction comedy film directed by Edgar Wright and written by Wright and Simon Pegg. It is the third and final film in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, after Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). Starring Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike and Pierce Brosnan, the film focuses on five friends who return to their hometown for a pub crawl and uncover an alien invasion.
In 1995, Wright wrote a screenplay titled Crawl about teenagers on a pub crawl. Deciding it was better suited as a comedic exploration of young adulthood and aging, he reworked the screenplay with Pegg in the early 2010s. The film was produced by Relativity Media, Big Talk Productions and Working Title Films.[4] Principal photography began on 28 September 2012 and lasted until that December, with filming locations including Elstree Studios, Letchworth Garden City, and Welwyn Garden City. The stunts were coordinated by members of Jackie Chan Stunt Team, and The World's End is considered a social science fiction film.[5]
The World's End premiered at Leicester Square in London on 10 July 2013, and was theatrically released in the United Kingdom by Universal Pictures on 19 July. Its release in the United States by Focus Features followed on 23 August. The film received positive reviews, with praise for the screenplay, performances of the cast, humour and direction. It won Best British Film at the 19th Empire Awards, and was nominated for Best Comedy at the 19th Critics' Choice Awards. The World's End grossed $46.1 million worldwide on a budget of $20 million.
Gary King, an immature 40-year-old alcoholic, decides to recapture his youth by contacting his boyhood friends Oliver Chamberlain, Peter Page, Steven Prince, and Andrew Knightley, and inviting them to complete the "Golden Mile", a pub crawl encompassing the 12 pubs of their hometown of Newton Haven, the last of them being the World's End. The group attempted the crawl as teens in 1990, but failed to reach the final three pubs. Andy, now a teetotaller due to a drunk driving incident years before involving himself and Gary, reluctantly agrees to join after Gary lies about his mother dying.
The group encounters Oliver's sister, Sam, who Gary and Steven fought over in school. In the fourth pub, Gary goes to the toilet, where he gets into a fight with a teenager and knocks his head off, exposing him as an android. As Gary's friends find him in the bathroom, they encounter several other androids and fight them off. They realize the town has been replaced by androids (which they dub "Blanks.")
Gary urges them to continue the pub crawl to avoid suspicion. The group bumps into Sam once more, and she, Gary, and Steven fight Blank versions of Sam's childhood friends, known as the "twins". She tags along with them, and Steven is told by Basil, a local conspiracy theorist who has not yet been replaced by a Blank, that the Blanks are trying to build a galactic conglomerate, and that any humans refusing will be replaced with identical simulants. The Blanks attempt to convince the humans to join their assimilation. Unwilling to lose their humanity and, finding out that both Oliver and their old school teacher, Mr. Shepherd, have been replaced, the group fights a bar full of Blanks.
Gary lets Sam escape Newton Haven by herself; Pete gets captured after attacking the Blank that has replaced his childhood bully; and, when Andy and Steven try to escape, Gary ditches them to finish the Golden Mile alone. Andy and Steven chase after Gary, as does the rest of Newton Haven, as Steven is captured.
In The World's End, Andy confronts Gary and reveals that his marriage is troubled, while Gary reveals a recent suicide attempt. Andy tries to stop Gary from drawing his final pint, but Gary clings to completing the Mile, as he believes it's all he has.
When Gary pulls the lever to pour himself a pint, the floor lowers into a hidden chamber. A disembodied alien entity, known as the Network, tells Gary and Andy that the Blank invasion is the first step to humanity joining a galactic community. The Network offers Gary eternal youth if he becomes a Blank, but he refuses. Along with Andy and Steven, who has survived, Gary calls out the tyranny in the Network's plan and demands that humanity be left to its own devices. The Network, exasperated, agrees to abandon the invasion. Sam rescues Gary, Andy, and Steven as the town is destroyed, but they are unable to outrun the pulse triggered by the departure of the Network, which deactivates Sam's car.
Some time later, Andy relates that the pulse triggered a worldwide blackout that destroyed all electrical power on Earth, sending humanity back to the Dark Ages. The remaining Blanks reactivated a few weeks later and, although they are now independent from the Network, they are mistrusted and shunned by most of the surviving humans. Andy's marriage has recovered, Steven is in a relationship with Sam, and the simulant versions of Peter and Oliver have picked up where their human versions left off. In the ruins of Newton Haven, the now-sober Gary enters a pub with the Blank versions of his younger friends and orders water. When the bartender refuses to serve Blanks, Gary leads his friends into a brawl with Gary declaring himself the king.
The World's End originated as a screenplay by writer-director Edgar Wright in 1995 at the age of 21 titled Crawl, about a group of teenagers on a pub crawl. He later realised the idea could work with adult characters to capture "the bittersweet feeling of returning to your home town and feeling like a stranger".[6] Wright also said he wanted to satirise the "strange homogeneous branding that becomes like a virus", explaining: "This doesn't just extend to pubs, it's the same with cafés and restaurants. If you live in a small town and you move to London, which I did when I was 20, then when you go back out into the other small towns in England you go 'oh my god, it's all the same!' It's like Bodysnatchers: literally our towns are being changed to death."[7]
In an interview for Entertainment Weekly, Pegg told Clark Collis, "People think we choose the genre first every time, and it's not true. We find the stories first. The notion of alienation from your hometown taken to its literal conclusion was how we got to science fiction."[8]
After the story was complete, Wright and Pegg examined a list of real pub names and "tried to make them like tarot cards" to foreshadow the events of the story. Wright explained: "So we said, 'OK this one's the Famous Cock, because this is where Gary is trying to puff up his own importance.' ... We did go through and work out in each one how the pub sign was going to relate."
Principal photography for The World's End began on 28 September 2012.[9] Filming took place in Hertfordshire, at Elstree Studios and on location in Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City.[10] Part of the film was also shot at High Wycombe railway station, Buckinghamshire.[11]
All twelve pubs in the film use identical signage on menus and walls, reflecting what Wright called "that fake hand-written chalk" common to modern British pubs. The exteriors of the real pubs were shot at locations in Welwyn Garden City and Letchworth Garden City, with altered signage.[12] [13] Letchworth Garden City railway station received a makeover to become the "Hole in the Wall".[14] Stunts were coordinated by Brad Allan, of martial arts film director Jackie Chan's team. Wright said: "In Drunken Master, Jackie Chan has to get drunk to fight, but this is more the idea of Dutch courage. You know, when you're kind of drunk and you think 'ah, I can climb up that scaffolding!' Or just that you're impervious to pain. One of the things we talked about is this idea that [the characters] become better fighters the more oiled they get."
The Broadway Cinema, Letchworth, a renovated independent cinema built in the 1930s in the Art Deco style,[15] was used to portray the Mermaid pub. This cinema was also the first outside London to play the film, with a special introduction by Pegg thanking the residents of Letchworth for their help during its making; over 800 viewers watched the film at the cinema on its opening night.[16]
See main article: The World's End (soundtrack).
The film uses alternative rock and pop music from the time of the characters' adolescence. Wright explained: "A lot of those songs are ones that really hit me and Simon hard when we were that age... [Gary] is still living by those rules. It's like he decided to take 'Loaded' and 'I'm Free' to heart and thinks the party's never going to end."
The soundtrack for the film was released on 5 August 2013 in the UK and 20 August 2013 in the United States, with the film's score, composed by Steven Price, released on the same day. In addition to songs featured in the movie, the album also features dialogue snippets.
The only songs featured in the film that did not make it onto the soundtrack are "The Only One I Know", "Summer's Magic" and "The Only Rhyme That Bites", by The Charlatans, Mark Summers and 808 State respectively. The version of "20 Seconds To Comply" which features in the film is the mix from Silver Bullet's album "Bring Down The Walls No Limit Squad Returns", albeit edited to remove dialogue samples from RoboCop. On the soundtrack album, it is replaced by the Bomb Squad mix (again re-edited to remove the samples). The original soundtrack tributes the song "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed" by Yes when the young characters reach the hills.
The World's End premiered on 10 July 2013 at Leicester Square in London[17] [18] and was released on 19 July 2013 in the United Kingdom. It was released in the United States on 23 August 2013.[19]
The World's End earned £2,122,288 during its UK opening weekend, losing the top spot to Monsters University. Its weekend grosses were higher than Shaun of the Deads £1.6 million but lower than Hot Fuzzs £5.4 million.[20]
In the United States, the film was released on 23 August and earned $3.5 million on its opening day, outperforming and You're Next. It had the highest per-cinema average out of all films in theatres throughout the country on its opening day.[21] Its opening weekend, the film earned $8,790,237, finishing fourth at the box office behind Lee Daniels' The Butler, We're the Millers, and The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.[22] This total exceeded box office expectations, which had ranged from $7 million[23] to $8.5 million,[24] and was also the biggest opening weekend for any of the films in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy.[25]
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an 89% approval rating, with a weighted average score of 7.40/10, based on 244 reviews. The website's critics consensus reads: "Madcap and heartfelt, Edgar Wright's apocalypse comedy The World's End benefits from the typically hilarious Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, with a plethora of supporting players."[26] On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 81 out of 100, based on 45 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[27] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[28]
Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B+, praising it as "hilarious" and the "best" collaboration of Wright, Pegg and Frost, and saying that "these pint-swilling Peter Pans also know how to work the heart and the brain for belly laughs... The finale is a little too shaggy and silly. But what do you expect after a dozen beers?"[29]
Mark Dinning of Empire magazine gave the film four stars out of five, writing: "Bravely refusing to rigidly adhere to a formula that has been so successful, Wright, Pegg and Frost's Cornetto Trilogy closer has tonal shifts you won't expect, but the same beating heart you've been craving."[30]
Henry Barnes of The Guardian gave the film four stars out of five, writing: "With this final film they've slowed down a bit, grown up a lot. And saved the richest bite until last."[31]
Keith Uhlich of Time Out New York named The World's End the ninth-best film of 2013, praising Pegg's "hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of over-the-hill deadbeatness."[32]
At the 19th Critics' Choice Awards in January 2014, The World's End received two nominations, for Best Actor in a Comedy (for Simon Pegg) and for Best Comedy, but lost to Leonardo DiCaprio and American Hustle, respectively.[33] [34] The film won Best British Film at the 19th Empire Awards held in London in March 2014.[35]
It received nominations for three awards at the 40th Saturn Awards: Best International Film, Best Writing, and Best Actor for Pegg.[36] At the 2014 MTV Movie Awards it received nominations for: Best Fight (for Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, & Eddie Marsan) & Best Comedic Performance (for Simon Pegg).[37] [38]