It should be no surprise to anyone that I'm a fan of zombie films and, by extension, zombie media in general -TV shows and of course books included. So of course I loved the Zombie Survival Guide when it came out and I loved its "sequel" World War Z even more (even the parts that made me sad). So when the news first hit that there was going to be a World War Z movie you can probably imagine just how excited I was about it. And at first things just kept getting better and better with it. J. Michael Straczynski was writing it! There was a bidding war between Brad Pitt's and Leonardo DiCaprio's production companies for the rights!
And then I saw the trailer, and a part of me died inside.
I didn't quite qive up hope, though. After all, I knew as well as anyone how often a film's trailer ended up giving a completely different view of a finished film. There was still hope... wasn't there?
...Eventually I'll kill that last spark of naive idealism inside me. In the meantime, it'll provide food for my unending cynicism.
Anyway, Brad Pitt plays one Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator recently retired for a quiet life with his family. That all ends one day in New York, however, when thousands upon thousands of sprinting zombies appear out of nowhere while he's stuck in a traffic jam. After narrowly escaping New York alive, Lane and family get dropped on one of the many aircraft carriers now being used as sea-bound refugee camps as the zombies have overrun most cities in pretty short order, and Lane gets press-ganged back into his investigator job as he hops from country to country trying to find a cure for the zombie virus.
Okay, let's deal with the zombie elephant in the room first. Aside from the title and a few vague parts in the film (the use of boats as floating refugee camps and Israel reacting fastest to the zombie threat being the main ones), the film of World War Z is nothing like the book. Nothing. We have no collection of veteran survivor stories from around the world. No discussion of sociological, economical and ecological implications. And perhaps the worst insult of all, the fact that the zombies are so damn fast - something that was even mocked by Max Brooks in the Zombie Survival Guide as a "Hollywood invention" (How they managed to miss the point there so completely will remain a mystery to me). The irony is almost too strong for words.
As for the film on its own merits... honestly, it's more of a collection of setpieces in search of a complete movie. There's the scenes in New York at the start. Then one in South Korea. Then one in Jerusalem, a quick one on a plane and finally one in Wales - all of them connected by a flimsy narrative (Lane, apparently the last UN investigator qualified in the whole world, must single-handedly find the cure or his family will be thrown off the boat to fend for themselves).
And it gets worse. World War Z is one of the most bloodless zombie movies I've ever seen - a combination of many of the zombie scenes being CGI and the fact that the zombie virus has an incubation time of 13 seconds (beating the Rage virus in 28 Days Later by about 20-30 seconds, quite an achievement in the realm of impossible virology). I'm not someone who can't enjoy a film unless blood is gushing across the screen, but with a zombie film you should expect at least a little gore. It's also full of plot holes, quite a few continuity errors and the underlying feeling that Gerry Lane is in fact some kind of avatar of the Angel of Death, as within hours (sometimes minutes) of him arriving somewhere, you know that something will go wrong and zombies will soon swarm CGI-like over whatever defenses there are and everyone will be forced to flee.
Overall, World War Z felt to me like one of the biggest movie disappointments of recent years. And yet, they're making a sequel...
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