DVD Review: See ‘The World’s End’ before it’s too late
The year is almost over, and my favorite film so far is Edgar Wright’s “The World’s End,” his third feature collaboration with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. When it came out, I mentioned how much I looked forward to the home video release, because, between the British accents and the rapid-fire pace of the dialogue, a lot had gone right by me.
Now, the disc has arrived and it delivers in all categories. As I suspected, amid the many wonderful lines I did catch originally lay almost as many I had missed. And, of course, in a pinch there is always the subtitle track. The visuals on the Blu-ray have a lot of snap, the audio mix is good, and the movie seems better and more complex than I had realized, in thanks partly to the supplements.
Wright has always jammed his discs with extras, and this is no exception. Universal’s “U-Control” allows you to watch the story boards in a small box during some scenes, and there are optional trivia pop-up windows as well. (Does anybody actually watch movies that way?) There are three commentary tracks: one with Wright and Pegg; one with Wright and cinematographer Bill Pope; and one with Pegg, Frost, and costar Paddy Considine. Wright and Pegg together have great chemistry, and their remarks give a lot of information while being full of funny ad libs and free associative banter.
The other material includes a 50-minute “making of” documentary; trailers; one short deleted scene; 10 minutes of outtakes; more than 20 minutes of other scraps; and at least another hour and a half of behind-the-scenes shorts, which occasionally duplicate material from the “making of.” Of all this stuff, the most eye-opening are “Signs and Omens,” which gathers all the repeated visual motifs, mostly in the background; and “Edgar and Simon’s Flip Charts,” equivalents of which were also provided on the “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” discs. Wright and Pegg show scrawled sheets of diagrams and narrative chronologies, explaining the stages of the writing process for 13 minutes. Together with their commentary track, it makes the movie even richer than I had imagined.
“The World’s End” (Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, $34.98; DVD, $29.98)
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).