Synopsis The World's End
Gary King (Simon Pegg), a middle-aged alcoholic, resolves to track down his estranged friends and complete the "Golden Mile", a pub crawlencompassing 12 pubs in their hometown of Newton Haven. The group attempted the crawl as teenagers over 20 years earlier, but failed to reach the final pub, The World's End. Gary persuades Peter Page (Eddie Marsan), Oliver "O-Man" Chamberlain (Martin Freeman), Steven Prince (Paddy Considine), and Andy Knightley (Nick Frost) to join him in Newton Haven. While his friends have adult lives and responsibilities, Gary has changed little since 1990, remaining untrustworthy and impulsive.
The group and their mission are not met with the hero's welcome Gary expects, and Gary relearns that he had been barred for life from one of the pubs. The group are briefly joined by Oliver's sister Sam (Rosamund Pike), over whose affections who Gary and Steven were rivals at school. In the toilets of the fourth pub on the crawl, Gary gets into a fight with a surprisingly strong and agile local teenager. Gary accidentally knocks the teen's head off, exposing him as a robot. Gary's friends join him and fight more robot youths, after which Andy abandons his teetotal ways and drinks an order of shots meant for the whole group. Unsure how many robots there may be, the group decide to continue the pub crawl as "just five friends, on a night out, having a good time", so as to avoid attracting suspicion.
Several pubs later, the group runs into Sam again and Gary warns her of the robot invasion. Though skeptical of the news at first, Sam is convinced after Gary saves her from twin robots impersonating her friends. At The Mermaid, robots attempt to seduce the men and steal their DNA. When Sam's childhood crush Adrian appears, she panics and drags the others from the pub, explaining that Adrian had died in a motorcycle crash years previously. When they reach the next pub, Guy Shepherd (Pierce Brosnan), a teacher from the group's secondary school, encourages them to accept their fate and be replaced by robots. Noticing the reappearance of a surgically removed birthmark on Oliver's head, Andy realises that he has been replaced with a robot, and crushes his head with a barstool. A fight breaks out, during which Gary insists on drinking a pint for the sake of the pub crawl's integrity. Overwhelmed, the group scatter and Gary takes Sam to her car, urging her to leave Newton Haven.
Once reunited, the friends accuse each other of having been replaced by robots. Steven, Peter and Andy prove their humanity with scars from their past, and Andy reveals that his resentment of Gary stems from an accident that occurred as he was trying to save Gary after a drug overdose. Gary refuses to roll his sleeves up to reveal a scar on his elbow, and instead repeatedly head-butts a pillar to prove that his skull is tougher than those of the robots. The robots close in on the group and capture Peter. Despite this, Gary is determined to finish the pub crawl and runs towards the final one on their list, The World's End. Abandoning Steven, Andy chases Gary through the streets, fighting robots along the way and encountering a large robot previously concealed as a sculpture.
At The World's End, Andy confronts Gary. During an ensuing quarrel, Andy notices that Gary's wrists are bandaged and marked with a hospital armband, indicating that Gary had been sectionedfor a suicide attempt. Andy questions whether Gary can distinguish between his drunkenness and sobriety anymore. Gary tearfully tells him that his adult life has been a failure, and that finishing the Golden Mile is the only thing he has left. He is jealous of Andy for having an ideal life, but Andy reveals that his marriage is falling apart, and pleads with Gary to give up the crawl and get help. Gary ignores him and tries to draw his final pint. The tap lever instead lowers the bar into a hidden chamber, where the two are reunited with Steven. A disembodied entity called "The Network" (voiced by Bill Nighy) reveals that the robot invasion of the town is one of 2,000 "penetration points" on Earth, as part of a "civilizing" process for humanity's own good, and that it had been responsible for all of humanity's advances in telecommunications in recent decades. The Network offers the men eternal youth should they choose to become robots, but the three friends decline, belligerently arguing that humans should be allowed to be free. Concluding that humanity is more trouble than it's worth, The Network abruptly ceases communication and abandons the invasion. Sam arrives to drive the trio to relative safety as the town begins to self-destruct.
Some time later, Andy recounts this story around a campfire in the ruins of London, explaining how the destruction of Newton Haven was accompanied by a worldwide electro-magnetic pulse that wiped out modern technology and set humanity back to the Dark Ages. The remaining robots have reactivated and are regarded with understandable mistrust by surviving humans. Andy's marriage has recovered, Steven is in a relationship with Sam, and robot versions of Peter and Oliver have returned to a semblance of their former lives. In the ruins of Newton Haven, the now-sober Gary enters a pub with a group of robot companions and orders five glasses of water, reprising his speech from the start of the Golden Mile. When the bartender refuses to serve any robots, Gary draws a sword and leads his robot friends into a brawl.
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