You ever watched a football match, or Cricket, or any sport really and this happens:- It's your favourite team, they're legendary in your eyes, and been a good match so far. Sure there's something off about the way your team's playing, but you chalk that up to nerves, or that they're playing tactics you're not familiar with. Then, in the last few minutes, the other side scores an equaliser. Your heart's in your mouth as the ref calls extra time. Boom, they come out swinging while your team just flounders. The match is lost and you head down to the pub to blitz the whole thing from your memory.
That is exactly what happens in Pegg and Wright's new film At Worlds End. They had all the ingredients, but in the end it all went wrong. And, more importantly, I can tell you why and exactly where it fumbled. And that's the end of that metaphor, I hope.
Quick summery, and there are spoilers so if you don't want them you've already got my opinion. Good start, fun middle, botched ending but still worth seeing.
Summery, Gary King is a poor slob who's midlife crisis hit early. He's never got past one teenage night of sex, drugs and copious amounts of alcohol. On that night he and four friends failed in their legendary golden mile pub crawl. Gary wants to, near enough twenty years later, get his friends back together and try again. He lies, bribes and manipulates them to come back from their separate lives for this one night. One night that takes a sharp turn in the wrong direction when they find out their old, dismal home town is just one of many fronts in an alien invasion.
This works, it fits in with the whole ethos of the Cornetto Trilogy, namely the bait and switch of the genre's (Shaun took a rom-com and made it a horror, Hot Fuzz took a buddy cop comedy and made it an action thriller). Here it's a teenage comedy and becomes a Sci-Fi action drama. There's even the obligatory Bond actor cameo and fence gag that viewers of the other two films will recognise. It really does feel like part of a series, even one as loosely connected as this. There are even a number of head nods to the other two films and a good few in jokes and references that had me smiling. Even laughing, and that's a difficult thing for a film to do on purpose these days.
Now another common trick with the Cornetto Trilogy is to signpost what's coming up in the end. Either directly reference it or lace a strong thread of foreshadowing throughout the film. It's obvious that both Pegg and Wright love the writing convention of Chekov's Gun and play with it at every opportunity. (look it up if you don't get the reference) This time I feel this particular gun backfired.
The first time we see Gary, as played by Pegg, he is sitting in a school (or church) hall with a bunch of other people. Telling them, and us, the back story of the plot. You know that one scene was going to be very important later on for Gary's development and it was. A bit later on one of the lies he uses to get his friend to come on the pub crawl was that his mother died of Cancer. Now being me I put two and two together. Thinking it was Gary that had the cancer and he wanted to finish this one thing as a sort of Bucket list; Finally finish the Golden Mile.
Of course that wasn't what happened. It turned out that Gary was an alcoholic that had attempted suicide some time earlier. Now I think a dying Gary, not trapped in the past but just trying to have one good memory to hold him together in the bad times ahead, would be a lot more poignant. Alcoholic Gary is a sad figure, he is pitied by the viewer. Which makes his drunken speech about free will less effective.
Think about it; On the one hand you have a dying man, who is an acknowledged dick to his friends, a man that never had a true direction and wanted to live a life free of responsibility. He's done so and he's enjoyed it, but is now facing an undignified early death. Or a forty year old man-child that has never grown up crying in a drunken haze that life is really difficult.
I get it, we're not supposed to like Gary and you're right we don't. I don't want to but Gary should have something about him. His abject dickery, his lies, his attitude should just be one side of him and the last act of the film should have showed the other. The one who stood up for his bullied friend, the one who was the first to stand by his friends when something went wrong. Sure have him be a true arsehole, but give him something more. Something that lets us root for the bastard, not wonder just why anyone wanted to be his friend. Ever.
I don't want to pity our lead, I want to sympathise and relate to him. Big difference.
This is a real same because everyone involved did their best. We have some great acting from Pegg, Frost and everyone else. Wright directs the hell out of every stylised shot and cut he can. There's nothing wrong with that, Just that miss-fire of an ending.
Well that and the full ending. You see a clever, if hackneyed, end would be that it was the end of Gary's world. His world ends when he dies and everyone else has to live with it. Somebody, somewhere else delivers the killing blow to the alien invaders. Making Gary's triumph and big speech at the end utterly pointless, a foot note in the history books while some yank with a massive gun or EMP did the real work. Instead we got the literal end of the world, where all technology is destroyed and the people that survive are forced to become farmers. Eking out a meagre existence behind rusted chain link fences and huddle around burning oilcans in the shadow of the decaying cities.
Now the problem with with both the above was that the film felt like it was building up to what I thought was going to happen and suddenly took a left turn. If I didn't know better I'd say that the distributor did some audience test screenings and it came back baldy and the distributor told them to change the ending. One desperate rewrite of the last act and this was what they came up with. What convinces me, other than the fact the Cancer plot thread was dropped faster than a live hand grenade, is the way the whole thing would have fitted together. The single most important part of the Trilogy is that the whole thing comes together at the end. This, I'm sorry to say, didn't.
I do hope I'm right, because if I am a Directors Cut DVD is in the cards and I could see how it should have ended. Eventually. Until then ladies and gentlemen drink up, and go see the Film for yourselves.
Thomas
No comments:
Post a Comment