This article was taken from the August 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
This is the summer of the po-faced, apocalyptic film epic: Tom Cruise, Will Smith and Brad Pitt are all doing their self-sacrificing, blockbusting best to save humanity. The stars of The World's End avert Armageddon, too, but also find time for the pub. "This movie is about friends on a drinking quest in the face of imminent doom," director Edgar Wright says. "It's not a rapture movie. But it's definitely a sci-fi comedy and it has a sort of Armageddon in it."
The film is the last in the "three flavours Cornetto" trilogy (this one's mint choc-chip, for aliens) that includes Hot Fuzz (original blue, signifying police) and Shaun of the Dead (strawberry, blood). It follows Simon Pegg's Gary King as he and his grown-up school friends recreate a teenage pub crawl.
Wright took inspiration from an aborted pub crawl of his own, along with "paranoid sci-fi films and literature, mostly postwar, here and in the US -- what's called social-science fiction." His garden-city version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers has its own resonance: "There's this feeling when you go back to your hometown -- that the pubs have become chains or gastropubs. That idea of your hometown slowly being replaced."
According to Wright, The World's End ups the action from
Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. "It's very intense and big for a British film." But it's undeniably British: for one stunt, the production destroyed the Sollershott Circus, the first ever roundabout built in the UK ("it's very historic"), in Letchworth Garden City; local papers reported that, thanks to the film, the roundabout now had "a new lease of life". "I still have this mischievous zeal to trash and do terrible things to the country that I love."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
