The World's End is the last film in Edgar Wright, Nira Park, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, the earlier films being Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Like its predecessors, it's a genre parody - this time, of middle-class English alien invasion stories in the vein of John Wyndham novels and the Quatermass franchise. This article is going to be mostly a reaction to the most spoileriffic parts of the film, so I'll start with a quick mini-review for folks who don't want spoilers and then leave a spoiler space before saying what I really want to say about it.

The World's End opens with a narration by Simon Pegg's character, Gary King, telling the tale of a legendary pub crawl he and his friends Steven Prince (Paddy Considine), Oliver Chamberlain (Martin Freeman), Peter Page (Eddie Marsan), and Andrew Knightley (Nick Frost) embarked on way back in 1990 after their last day at school. King was the hyper-cool (in a very gothic Sisters of Mercy-worshipping sort of way) leader of the gang, and he'd convinced the others to attempt the Golden Mile: a pub crawl wending its way through all 12 pubs in their small country home town of Newton Haven, the last pub of which was, naturally, the legendary World's End. Drama, drunkenness, and toking of weed ensued, and in the end they had to pack it in having only visited 9 of the pubs, so despite having a mostly successful night (by King's reckoning) they never actually got to The World's End.

Now it's over two decades later, and all of a sudden King shows up back in his friends' lives, cajoling, persuading, bribing and emotionally blackmailing them into attempting the Golden Mile one more time. Whilst all the other pals have clearly moved on in life - and Andy, in particular, wants no more to do with King due to a traumatic bust-up at some point in the intervening years - King clearly hasn't, to the point where he still wears the same clothes. Out of a mixture of obligation, nostalgia, and pity, the friends agree to accompany King on this fool's errand.

Then they discover that something very strange has happened to Newton Haven since they all moved to London, and all hell breaks loose.

The big thing I would say to anyone going in to see the film is that you shouldn't expect a laugh riot on the level of the previous two movies. The Cornetto films have always been genre hybrids - comedy-horror, comedy-action, and now comedy-SF-drama - but this time around the comedy side is leaned on much less heavily. That's not to say that there isn't a laugh or two, but you should also be ready for some depressing bits.

On top of that, for reasons I will explain in the full analysis below, I think it is less satisfying as a standalone movie than the other two films. In particular, towards the end the film relies a lot on a couple of big and surprisingly inelegant info-dumps, which makes me suspect that there may have been problems with the script, and whilst the previous two movies quite adeptly wrapped up their stories with their epilogue, I felt The World's End left some important stuff unexplored.

OK, spoiler space time.
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Righty! To kick off with, let's unpack Gary King. King is a notably unpleasant character for an awful lot of the film, and although his motivations for trying to redo the Golden Mile do make him seem a bit more human when they're finally revealed to us, to a large extent they make him seem more pathetic than sympathetic.

Basically, for those of you who haven't seen the movie but are reading these spoilers anyway, Gary is revealed over the course of the film to be far and away the most miserable of the friends underneath his jovial facade. Whereas he harps on at them for growing up and getting proper jobs and houses and being predictably middle-class, he has utterly failed to move on from and let go of being 17, and whilst a 17-year-old who behaves like Gary King is kind of a cool dude, if only to other 17-year-olds, a 40-year-old who behaves like that just looks kind of pathetic. This is exacerbated by the fact that it is outright stated that King has spent most of the intervening years between school and now with a serious drug addiction, and there's strong implications that he's been in residential care for a good long while but escaped to drag his friends on this doomed attempt to recapture a youth whose ship has well and truly sailed.

This comes out really nicely in his interactions with Andy. In the previous films, Simon Pegg's characters may have been dicks, but they were dicks with obvious sympathetic traits; conversely, Nick Frost's characters were utter disaster areas (a juvenile slob in Shaun of the Dead, a naive incompetent in Hot Fuzz) who both reveal their own better qualities over the course of the movie and help Pegg overcome his dickishness over the course of the story. Here, they seem to have quite deliberately inverted that. Nick Frost's character at first seems to be a total square, but over the course of the film it's revealed that actually he's been a bloody good friend to King over the years, only washing his hands of the guy when it became clear that he is so utterly self-absorbed that he simply doesn't care about the negative effects his behaviour has on the people around him. (In particular, the details of the mysterious "accident" King and Andy were involved in that terminated their relationship really drive home the point that King is a loathsome human being who would have left Andy to bleed out in a car crash simply to avoid trouble with the police.)

Conversely, whilst King starts out sounding like a cool dude, it rapidly becomes apparent that he's one of those people who it is actively dangerous to have as a friend - the sort of person whose self-destructive behaviour makes you feel desperate to help them, but at the same time is such an unrelenting shithead about it that you just know they're not taking anything seriously except their own needs and they're just going to keep damaging themselves and people around them because of that. One thing the film is really good at is highlighting just how painful it is to be a close friend of someone like that; you can tell that it absolutely devastates Andy to see King doing this to himself, and you can also see that King's inability to adapt to the adult world is so total, so complete, that the best Andy can hope for is to learn to tolerate Gary and not get dragged down by him, because he certainly isn't going to save Gary and it's doubtful whether Gary even wants to be saved. Gary's plot arc is essentially one long cautionary tale which loudly and clearly makes the point that failing to engage with the adult world and demanding that life treat you on the terms you demand is unrealistic, juvenile, and ultimately self-defeating, and the accompanying failure to grow emotionally can render you incapable of being a good friend to the people who care about you.

This clashes radically with the conclusion of the film.

At the climax of the film our heroes discover that the residents of Newton Haven have been replaced by alien robots (or "blanks") as part of the process of preparing Earth to be part of the interstellar community. This is presented as exactly the sort of benign paternalism teachers tend to exercise at school, and King and crew convince the alien Network to give up and leave Earth to its own devices essentially by convincing them that human beings are rebellious children who won't play by anyone's rules. So far, all's in keeping with standard Hollywood fetishisation of the rugged individual, right?

Well, actually, the withdrawal of the aliens brings with it a global disaster: the technological underpinnings of society all vanish or explode, dragging everyone back to the Dark Ages. Although it is not stated outright, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that billions of people have died of starvation or other causes as a direct result of this. (We do not see any massive, brutal, sticks-rocks-and-scavenged-guns-based wars over resources that come about as a result of this, but it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that you'd get plenty of those happening too.) Moreover, King - on behalf of the human race - has shat away our one opportunity to leave the planet and be part of something bigger than just our one planet, dooming humanity to simply breed and die, breed and die, over and over again through the generations until the Sun goes out and the whole sorry farce ends.

The film seems terminally confused as to whether or not this is a good thing.

On the one hand, this could be a really neat subversion of that Hollywood individualism cult I was mentioning earlier. As Gary King's own backstory gruesomely illustrates, sticking your fingers in your ears and refusing to grow up doesn't actually get you anywhere. People like to believe that as humans we are independent and will never knuckle down and sacrifice our freedom, but actually we do it every day - that's precisely what you do when you agree to be part of society. We might not like the society we have, but to change it - or to forge an alternative - we still need to co-operate as part of a community. We are social animals, after all, and if we point-blank refuse to be part of any society or community, and equally refuse to sacrifice any of our freedoms for the purposes of rubbing along happily together we end up in a sorry state - look at Gary King, look at the Unabomber.

Admittedly, the aliens' intervention did involve a bunch of killings (though still much less than the billions of deaths caused by Gary and pals), though you could see their reduction of unco-operative folk to mulch as working with the Network-as-education-system parallel: education systems have a nasty way of tagging a subset of the kids who go through them as Useless Eaters and branding them as such with lousy grades, sabotaging (or at the very least severely complicating) their progress through life even as they claim to be preparing people for adulthood. That's obviously a problem, but the solution isn't to abolish education, which is what Gary and crew convince the Network to do.

Actually here is where there's an irritating ambiguity: the Network may or may not be killing people, since the film chronically shies away from specifying whether there is continuity of identity between humans and the blanks based on said humans. For the most part, we're lead to believe that continuity of identity isn't there and being blanked is essentially death. On the other hand, if that is the case then the Network offering Gary the chance to become a blank of his younger, sexier, less burned-out self is a completely absurd offer to make because it boils down to "hey, do you want us to kill you and replace you with a replicant?", a fate Gary has been violently avoiding throughout the film. You could ascribe it to the aliens not understanding human motivations and thinking that maybe they hadn't pitched their offer properly, but even so it's kind of crap salesmanship.

Equally, if there is no continuity of identity it makes a mockery of the supposed happy ending Peter enjoys, since actually his wife and kids don't get their actual dad back, and that's an actual tragedy and isn't as heartwarming as it's presented as being. In fact, there's a lot that makes no damn sense about the whole "blanks stick around and integrate into human society after a period of awkward hatred and distrust" deal - not least because blanks are really quite good at mimicing real humans, pretty much by design, so unless they have obvious injuries that a human wouldn't survive how would anyone identify them to persecute them in the first place? This is especially true in Gary's epilogue, where we see the adult Gary and youthful blanks of his friends decked out like Fields of the Nephilim and visiting a post-apocalyptic bar that looks like something out of the more Western-influenced bits of Fallout. Apparently, the denizens of the bar, who are complete strangers, are able to instantly suss that Gary's companions are blanks, but how are they supposed to tell this by sight alone?

Gary's epilogue is messy for more reasons than that, in the sense that it shows a troubling lack of growth for the character. Yes, he's drinking water now which presumably is meant to be a sign that he's shaken his addictions - though he could just be ordering water in tribute to Andy, who rants about how it's more tough to order water when everyone around you is drinking beer at one point in the film. But let's take a look at the bigger picture: he's still dressing like a gothic refugee from 1990, he's still trying to do this pub crawl he's built up in his head as being the meaning of life, and he's still living a rather empty and juvenile fantasy compared to everyone else - whereas the other characters' post-apocalypses are more low-key let's-pull-our-sleeves-up-and-rebuild affairs, he's living a Wild West dream.

Now, this could all be deliberate. It could be that we're meant to go away from the film with the impression that Gary King is a danger to himself and others whose irresponsibility has turned the world into a miserable ball of toil, suffering and starvation for the majority and a playground for one particular sociopath in a Sisters of Mercy t-shirt. Unfortunately, I don't think that's the case. In promotional interviews surrounding the film Edgar Wright shows an incredible ability to miss the point: apparently, the inspiration for the film's theme is "the bittersweet feeling of returning to your home town and feeling like a stranger", and that he wanted to write social science fiction to attack the way pubs and other places feel homogenised these days.

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.

Now, call me crazy, but I don't remember pubs in the 1990s being any less homogenised than they are today; nor do I think someone who abandons their home town to move to London really gets to complain that things changed in their absence. Your home town doesn't exist to be your personal nostalgia playground, and it doesn't have a responsibility to freeze itself in time for the sake of not hurting the feelings of someone who packed their bags and left as soon as they were old enough and had the means to do so. What Wright is offering here is not so much considered social commentary as it's the nostalgia-addled plaintive whine of a grumpy middle-aged man who has just discovered that shit changes and there are precious few sacred cows in this world and has the mistaken belief that this is somehow new and different and a novel experience rather than something that's been going on for substantially longer than any of us have been alive. To complete the Luddite formula, the film even works in a suggestion that information technology is somehow an alien menace rather than, you know, one of the most remarkable and empowering social advancements of the last couple of decades.

Wright claims to be writing "social science fiction" here, with an eye to real social issues, but if the direst and most urgent issue facing 2010s Britain you can think of is "ooh dear, fashions in pub branding these days aren't the same as fashions in pub branding back in my day" perhaps you should fucking think twice before claiming to have something resembling a fucking social conscience, you fucking self-absorbed self-pitying midlife-crisis-wallowing tosspot. Oh sorry, did I get personal there? Good. I fucking meant to. Wright's concern with comparative non-issues like the way pubs brand themselves feels decidedly like missing a large, important forest for the sake of a comparatively trivial tree. This is the sort of crap which makes me fear that we are meant to take Gary King's refusal to embrace change as the opportunity it is as some sort of heroic quality, rather than the cause of his downfall. Forgive me, Pegg, Frost, Park and Wright, if I can't quite embrace a man who constantly hurts everyone who gets close to him, and follows that up by hurting everyone in the world.

In short, the conclusion of The World's End left me deeply dissatisfied. I'd gone to see it with Julian and as we came out we were both left with the same feeling that the post-apocalypse part of the film felt dissatisfying - there's just too much stuff crammed into the short space of time we see the post-Network world, and the film just doesn't have enough time to give it the proper treatment (hence the infodump). In fact, in a slightly spooky fashion we'd both independently come to the same conclusion: the film would be much improved if the destruction of the world had happened 45 minutes in, and the second half of the film explored the consequences of what the characters had done in Newton Haven. As well as giving the post-apocalypse part of the story space to breathe and giving Wright and company a chance to properly develop the ideas they flirt with there, it would mean that the pub crawl section of the film could be contracted to feel slightly less padded and flabby.

As it stands, I kind of want to see a sequel to The World's End; whilst I felt that Shaun of the Dead's aftermath of a world with zombies integrated into society (shades of the treatments of blanks here?) was a good gag to end the film with but wouldn't sustain a whole sequel, and likewise I didn't really feel a burning urge to see the continuing adventures of Angel and Butterman from Hot Fuzz, here I kind of want Wright, Pegg, Frost and Park to go back here and give us more on what happens after Gary King and pals take a hot, steaming shit on the face of civilisation, if only in the hope that in the course of doing so they'd unpack what a senseless act of vandalism that was.