Movie review: The World’s End- Empty Nostalgia for the Loser Generation

Written by: Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg.

Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman.

Release Date: July 2013

Box Office: $46.1



Simon Pegg is Hollywood diet body gaunt, he looks wealthy, his new hair must have cost him a fortune, but is Nicholas Cage bad. Nick Frost, his old buddy, is still Humpty Dumpty rotund, an everyman foil to the overachieving Pegg machine. That Office bloke is here as well. He plays the same character that he always plays, with the wide-eyed facial tics and air of bemused exasperation that has served him so well during his entire acting career.

Mocking nostalgia, whilst making money out of nostalgia.

The plot is perfunctory and involves some boring middle-aged gits and their pathetic old mate (Simon Pegg) going on a final pub-crawl around a sleepy English town. The movie sags as the boring old men sit in pub chatting about the past. Pegg is wacky, but the rest of the cast look bored and not into it at all.

Imagine a group of tired middle-aged salesmen having a chat in a pub with a ‘wacky’ 1990’s character trying to get a reaction out of them. That’s the first third of the movie. It then gets purposefully silly as some ridiculous alien robots are introduced into the narrative. They had to appear, as nothing else was happening. The movie then descends into fight scenes with aliens exploding into blue goo, lots of running around, and sight-gags involving Simon Pegg falling over fences, as he tends to do in all of his other movies. Hey, isn’t this the same plot as Shaun of the Dead?

Yeah, it’s Shaun of the Dead 2, just like the first movie, but with an added sense of overwhelming sadness and nostalgic regret. The narrative is unsure of itself, it sags, it’s overwritten, it’s dull and it lacks a strong new idea to give everything a sense of urgency and life. The attempt is to criticise nostalgia, whilst making money from nostalgia. The contradiction comes across as hypocrisy, as the movie is nothing if not painfully, apologetically self-aware. As it concludes you can feel the producers panic as they realise that their theme of an invading alien population might be misconstrued as an attack on the open borders mass immigration policy that is turning the UK into a segregated nation of warring tribal communities. It doesn’t want to do anything that might upset the neo-liberal corporate consensus of cultural genocide of indigenous European culture, so it shoehorns in a politically correct ending to appease the almighty god of cultural diversity. Nice one lads. I think you got away with it.

Here comes the forward rolls and fights in a pub.

It’s all very sad, to see the cool of the past, regurgitated with diminishing returns. What you have in this movie is a nostalgic unit shifter aimed at a generation that gave us Tony Blair, the Iraq war, Police state surveillance, lies and corruption. It’s a generation that paved the way for what we have now. A crumbling western civilisation, being looted by a political class of neo-liberal lunatics with an enslaved population losing itself in I-Phones, fantasy, gambling, sports, celebrities, nostalgia and anything that helps to distract their minds from the painful reality that surrounds their everyday waking lives.

I left ‘The World’s End’ with my mind very much on waking concerns. There was no distraction from painful reality here. It left me with a familiar feeling of sad emptiness and regret that you always get from indulging in corporate sponsored nostalgia. What was new and cool has become old and lame, and try as you might, you cannot reinvent what is now gone. The World’s End is an old man sitting in a pub, alone, thinking about the good old days, unable to recreate them. He’s alive, but lost in a dead past. He’s out of time, and his cool old friends are married/buried (as Kurt said) in the suburbs.

The old man looks pathetic, but then reality kicks in and you realise that Simon Pegg is a Hollywood career actor. He appears in Star Trek. He’s a star. There’s no austerity for him. He escaped the UK. He did very well for himself. He might be playing the sad old man in the pub, but that sad old man, drinking alone, stuck in the past, wrapped up in useless nostalgia, he’s not Simon Pegg. That pathetic old man is the 1990’s generation, the defeated, retreated viewers of this movie.

I loved these guys in 'Spaced.'

We cannot recapture a lost feeling. We cannot live off of the fumes of the past. It’s dead, gone, we need to move on, and we need to deal with the reality that is now. If we stay in the nostalgic past we are the suckers, because we are the people paying for the nostalgic movie that does not resonate with concerns of today. The actors are doing very well, don’t worry about them. They’ll go home to big houses and careers, we’ll go home to debt caged routines and dreams of the days when our world still had possibilities.

Simon Pegg is a winner, just like he always was. These days he’s selling nostalgia to losers, a winner, milking the failures that make up his audience of ageing fanboys, a well he can drain before going back to making irrelevant movies in Hollywood with unfunny American actors. Why then does he still go through the old UK routine, with diminishing returns, when he can stay in Hollywood making nonsense movies for the big US market? Who knows? Perhaps he just needs to sure up his UK fanbase every now and then? I think that’s probably it.

I don’t want to be reminded of a useless past. Pegg portrays a loser in these movies, but he’s no loser. The audience fanboys stuck in useless 90’s nostalgia are the losers, he panders to them, he pretends to be them, and why not? He’s a winner, and winners always portray themselves as losers in order to gain favour with their audience. I don’t want to be a loser. I don’t want to be stuck in the past. The 1990’s created what we have now. I live now, not then, I want to talk about now. I want to move on.  I have no desire to live in the useless, dirty old past. I want to live today. I want to talk about today. I want to do something about today. Today is all we have. The past is a graveyard, an overgrown nowhere land of sad-eyed nostalgic losers. I don’t want to go there. I have to move on.


Rating: 4/10 (The movie is nostalgia aimed at UK males who grew up in the 1990’s. I grew up during that time period, and loved ‘Spaced’ so I’m in the target demographic, but all it did for me was to leave me feeling empty and depressed)

Laptop Guy- Tapping into the vein of cultural alienation and thwarted ambition first opened by Generation 'Spaced''

Get Laptop Guy here:
http://blackheartedpress.com/titles-2/

Interview with Laptop Guy artist Sha Nazir:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv6G9Du78DM



It was during my three-day half marathon sojourn in Edinburgh Scotland last year that I discovered the utterly wacky, yet painfully realistic comic book called ‘Laptop Guy.’ I found the book in an atmospheric, wonderfully creepy and heroically hanging on in the face of corporate hegemony comic book shop called ‘Deadhead comics.’

Laptop Guy was a comic book that looked a bit sad, a bit lonely, and a bit ordinary next to all of the steroid enhanced superhero nonsense books that looked imperiously down upon it from their lofty positions on the adjourning shelves.

But there’s a truth in sadness, and the book radiated a rare beam of truth amongst the army recruitment pamphlets and Marxist social justice warrior nonsense coming from the corporate powerhouses that dominate the comic book industry. It called to me, and somehow, I knew it would be good before I had even read it.

When I did actually read the book I laughed my ass off, then read it again trying to figure out what was so good about it, why it managed to do something that other comic books just weren’t doing for me. It’s a question that I put to the back of my mind for a while, but now after reading issues two and three of the series, I think that I’ve managed to nail down just why it works, and why it’s such an absolutely (rare) fantastic comic book.

Firstly, it’s about a guy who seems real. It’s about a guy we can relate to because we all know him. Actually rather than knowing him, we might actually BE HIM. This guy (Sha) is working a crappy McJob, despite being smart and wanting to find something in life that’s actually worth doing rather than acting like a cog in a corporate machine. His completely ridiculous, self-deluded life-plan is to write and draw a comic book that everybody will love, and by doing so he will escape from the crappy life and even crappier job that is slowly draining the life force from his very soul.

That’s where ‘Laptop Guy’ comes into it. Laptop Guy is the creative lifeline that Sha hopes will help him to escape from his McJob forever. However, this character is so ridiculous, so ludicrous, so doomed to fail that poor old Sha seems to have no hope, no chance or escaping the greasy embrace of his McJob whatsoever.

So, will this wacky creation known as 'Laptop Guy' help Sha escape his life of drudgery, or will the failure of his creative masterpiece spiral him into mental illness and life-long depression? Throw-in the planning of his best friends upcoming stag-do and a seriously weird co-worker and you have yourself a comic-book that avoids the cloaks, loads on the funny, and actually has something to say about life in the UK today.

How can you not identify with this guy? This guy is everybody I went to university with. He’s the generation that is overqualified and underemployed. A generation that was lied to, ate up the lie like a hungry, yet overly obedient doggy, and then found out that the food was crappy and is now giving them the s***s. That’s my generation, the duped generation, and I’m finally seeing it in a comic book.

The character of Sha is of course a comedic representation of real life tragedy. He’s not supposed to be a flesh and blood character that will leave you wailing in despair. He’s a character designed to make you laugh, and what makes him really work is the artwork by artist Sha Nazir.

Nazir draws him as a nervous, deluded, unhappy, incompetent twit but there’s a huge likeability factor about the way he is drawn, and despite all of his his flaws he’s a deeply sympathetic character. Yes, he’s fictional, but the character traits and flaws resonate deeply. He’s a comedy character, but there’s something very real about him as well. I see him in my generation, and yes, I see him in myself.

Laptop Guy reminds me very much of that old television show with Simon Pegg, the show where he plays a dorky wannabe living in a flat and dreaming about making it big in the world of geeks and comic books. Spaced, that was the name of it. A show that sparkled with creative energy and a feeling that it was tapping into something new, tapping into something that was being ignored by the cultural texts of it’s time.

Spaced was a show that concluded it’s run in 2001. That’s a long, long fourteen years ago now, so don’t you think it’s about time that the vein was tapped into again? I do, and that’s what Laptop Guy is doing, tapping into the vein of bubbling, lost generation creativity that is being squandered in McJobs and rejection letter after rejection letter before unexpected pregnancies and middle-life compromise combines to crush the creativity all-together.

Laptop Guy is, at its very core, a very funny comic book. It makes me laugh, makes me feel good and makes me feel that there is at least somebody out there (in Scotland) who gets it, and has the ability to transfer that ‘it’ into an entertaining contemporary comic book. Could writer Jack Lothian and artist Sha Nazir be the new Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson of our post Snowden times? That’s quite a question to ask, but going on what I am reading here in LapTop Guy the comparison isn’t quite as out there as you might think.

The vein opened by Pegg, Stevenson and co in the late 1990’s is still good, and when I read Laptop Guy in 2015 I get the sense that something big could be starting to take off here. The smart comedy vein of geek culture alienation and thwarted ambition has plenty of mileage left in it yet, and if you want to see it being tapped into again, then Laptop Guy is a comic book that will be right up your geeky, lonely, run-down comic book store alley.