Getting to Feelings at The World’s End

by Bill Johnson

I find it interesting that movies that are comedies often take characters to a place of deeper feeling than some big-budget Hollywood films. A recent example is a comparison of The World’s End, Elysium, and Oblivion.

The World’s End is a comedy about a middle-aged man who knows his life hit its peak on the night he graduated from high school and, with his four mates, failed in an epic pub crawl.

When we meet the main character, we learn that this is his central issue in life. When we meet his mates as adults, we learn something about their issues. By the end of the film, we’re allowed to access each character’s dramatic truth – what drives them – and the deeper state of feelings the story’s plot takes them to.

For films aimed at any kind of general audience, this is the prime goal, to make the story a journey of feeling. In popular stories, viewers and readers get to access deeper, and more pure, states of feeling than many people experience in real life.

Films that fail to provide that journey of feeling often fail to find a large audience.

If you fail at that, your story fails.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, visit my website or check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise. Or, find me on Google+ and tell me what you think.