Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg Call ‘THE WORLD’S END’ A ‘Sci-Fi Comedy’, I Call It Awesome

Yes, Wright and Pegg. I will take more news about The World’s End. Just keep the details coming.

Slashfilm:

We know from years and years of rumor that while  Shaun of the Dead  was Pegg and Wright’s homage to the horror genre and  Hot Fuzz  was their homage to action films,The World’s End  — the spiritual sequel to those two movies — would be their homage to disaster films. Or something like that. But how does a pub crawl turn into that, even if one of the pubs is called “The World’s End?”

In their interview with  Empire  (which, as of now, is only sampled online) Pegg confirms the pub crawl is twelve pubs with World’s End being the final one. Wright chimes in to say “This is as much about where you grew up as the people you grew up with…” He then added: “It’s also very silly. I would say it’s darker, more personal and more silly” which echoes some of their statements at the recent  Hero Complex Film Festival.

All of that is well and good but we still don’t have the genre. That’s where things get interesting. Here’s Wright:

Hard to say…It’s a sci-fi comedy. Social science-fiction. Look it up on Wikipedia and then bone up on John Christopher and John Wyndham.

If you do just that, you get the following definition:

Social science fiction is a term used to describe a subgenre of science fiction concerned less with technology and space opera and more with sociological speculation about human society. In other words, it “absorbs and discusses anthropology”, and speculates about human behavior and interactions.

Books mentioned include H.G. Wells  The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley’s  Brave New Worldand George Orwell’s  1984. My mind immediately goes to something like  Blade Runner  orStarship Troopers. However, Wright specifically said Christopher and Wyndham andEmpire  believes those two authors link at a very specific place: the alien invasion, as per the books  The Tripods  and  The Day of the Triffids.

If  The World’s End  is a social sci-fi, alien invasion fits perfectly. Aliens invading can obviously be construed as social commentary, it fits the sci-fi genre and qualifies as an “apocalyptic” event.

This sounds awesome.