THe World's End - a short review

Science fiction science fiction you’re just a genre with bad diction. So said no one – ever in the entire history of time. But the point is Sci-Fi is a genre and therefore down in the literary pecking order. Hey but hold yer eight legged green equine creatures a moment. Isn’t that whole hierarchy of aesthetics a pooey phoney Victorian thing? You know where historical paintings are more important than portraits or landscapes and shit. It is? Oh good because for a moment I thought we were still applying such moronic notions to art today. Like that other idea that art can’t be entertaining and serious. I took my 13-year-old son to see World’s End earlier this month. He was thrilled because the certificate was a 15 and not I’ll have you a 15A, which would have meant that I would have had to simply decide in my parental wisdom that he was mature enough to see the film. Oh no the missing A meant that we were officially sticking it to the man. And we were real men. Just like the blokes on the screen in front of us. We together were being men sharing the secrets of our flawed strangely-strong-yet-fragile personas in a darkened chamber. There is something about science fiction (not fantasy) that gets to the very core of human-ness. The reason for this is almost stupidly obvious. It is a genre where being human is not a given and we are therefore able to see ourselves from outside. The whole big goddamn screwy experiment called planet human is laid bare. That’s us. Silly old us, fighting and fucking and generally making a real mess of this glorious world. But you know what we can love. I mean really love. And when everything really fucks up we can collaborate and use the interdependence that binds us all to find a way through the mess we’ve created. This is what World’s End said to me. Humans are not Robots. We are not slaves to the system – represented in the film by an invasive alien civilisation – which we ourselves have created. We can shut the whole fucked up mess down and start from scratch in a place where we will once more share stories in the dark and value experience over re-representation and commodification. Sticking it to the man. Steve Jobs, Alan Sugar, Richard Branson, Mr Innocent, dragon’s den, Wil-Iam, Pharrel Williams, Kanye and Kim your boys took a beating today. Sort of an antidote to this - YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DAMN YOU! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL! (camera pans to reveal the half-destroyed Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand)