The World's End

Edgar Wright first wrote this in 1995, at twenty one, as a screenplay called Crawl about teenagers on a pub crawl. He aged them up later; what interested him was the bittersweet feeling of returning to your home town as a stranger. The film is the third and final entry in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The twelve pubs on the Golden Mile carry deliberately identical signage: chain uniformity is the target, and Wright compared it to Bodysnatchers, saying towns are being changed to death. The names are not random either. Wright and Simon Pegg went through real pub names and used them like tarot cards, so each stop announces what happens inside it. Brad Allan, from Jackie Chan’s stunt team, staged the fights, and the joke built into the design is that the characters fight better the drunker they get. Shooting took place in autumn 2012 in Hertfordshire, at Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, on a British production with American partners. Pegg plays the one who cannot stop drinking, Nick Frost the teetotal, orderly one. A good fit if you accept a twelve stop checklist as structure and can wait several pubs for the science fiction turn. Not for anyone expecting a reunion comedy that finally proves Gary right.