World War Z Review

This has been a weird summer at the movies.  Just take a look at what's out now.  Weirdos with superpowers.  "Monsters University."  Bald dudes with no necks leaping out of speeding cars.  Alan from "The Hangover Part III".  Bank robbing magicians.  Emotionless spacemen with pointy ears.  An M. Night Shyamalan movie.

Now we have a movie with Brad Pitt fighting zombies.  What a strange world we live in.

"World War Z" is based on the novel of the same name by Max Brooks (son of Mel).  I consider the book to be one of the all-time greatest zombie-themed works of art, right up there with George A. Romero's Living Dead trilogy, "Resident Evil" (the games), "The Walking Dead", "Shaun of the Dead" and "Dead Alive", among others.

Actually, forget all of that.  The movie has next to nothing to do with the book.  Comparisons between the book and the film are practically unwarranted.  It is "World War Z" in name only.

This "World War Z" is a global pandemic thriller not unlike "Outbreak".  Brad Pitt plays Kurt Cobain, an ex-United Nations aid worker turned family man who's brought back into the fold when a rapidly spreading zombie virus threatens the entire world with stinky deadness.  Soon he's hopping across the globe, in search of the source of the virus, hoping a cure can be found in time.

Okay, he's not playing Kurt Cobain.  I believe his character's name is Gerry.  But he looks like Kurt Cobain.

It's not a terrible movie.  It's watchable, with some pretty good parts, but it's very slight and forgettable, and very, very tampered with.  It's like a person who's undergone so much unecessary plastic surgery that the original person underneath has been almost completely lost beneath the storebought genericness.  The plastic surgery metaphor is not inaccurate.  This movie has a long, tortured production history, with lots of studio tampering to boot (from Paramount Pictures - the new kings of filmmaking interference).  No less than 26(!) screenwriters have contributed to the flick, though only four received onscreen credit.  The filming was plagued with problems, especially overseas.  Then there's the last-minute replacement of the expensive climactic sequence, which I will address shortly.

What we have here is the first megabudget zombie movie in the history of all film.  That alone makes it worth a look.  There are some highly impressive zombiegeddon vistas to be seen in "World War Z" (even if some of the zombies look like CG ragdolls).  For the first two-thirds of its running time, the movie speeds along at a brisk clip.  The cinematography is good, the music is decent, and Pitt draws us into the narrative with his bonafide movie star charisma and acting chops.  Gerry's been in "The Shit" before.  He's absolutely badass, the quick-thinking guy you want on your team when "The Shit" goes down.  There are a couple of tricks he uses that I will have to remember when the zombie apocalypse begins.

It's just too bad that none of the characters in the movie truly come to life.  They are mere sketches.  Gerry comes off the most developed because Pitt is such a likeable guy, but really, he's a bare-bones character.  He loves his family and will risk his life to save them, and he used to be a badass aid worker in dangerous parts of the world - end of sketch, that's it.  There's no spark.  The same goes for all of the supporting characters.  There are some potentially interesting characters in the movie portrayed by talented actors who never really coalesce.  They fade away into the background.

There are a couple of decent action sequences in the movie.  Director Marc Forster is the guy who made "Quantum of Solace", a James Bond movie which was good in its quiet moments but had some of the worst shot, most incoherent action scenes in action movie history.  Thankfully Forster seemed to have learned from his past experiences.  His action scene orchestrations in "World War Z" are still clumsy (until the CG guys take over), but not as maddening as QOS.  Forster is better at the quiet, moody stuff.

Which brings me to the climax.

-SPOILER ALERT-

The original climax of the movie was a highly expensive action sequence that took place in Moscow.  For some unknown reason, that climax was replaced with a newly-shot sequence in Wales, the one which now ends the film.  The end budget of the film?  About $200 million.  But I digress.

This new end sequence is a tense, intimate, scary little number, arguably the most effective part of the entire movie.  It's like something out of a low budget zombie flick, not a megabudget summer blockbuster.  It feels totally out of place, but not unwelcome.  Unfortunately, its smaller scale makes it feel like the scene that comes right before the climax, so when the movie suddenly ends it feels like a stop rather than a wrap up.  Then there's that awful montage and voiceover at the end ("the war continues, fight on. . ." barffff) which elicited a few "boos" at the screening I attended.  Interestingly enough, snippets of the original Moscow climax were used in the montage.

Here's my theory:  I think that the movie originally ended with the finding of the cure and the ending of the zombie war.  Paramount Pictures took a look at this and said, "No!  We want a franchise, dammit!"  So they had them shoot a new climax at the last minute, one where an advantage is discovered but the cure is not found and the war goes on.  Expect "World War Z Part 2" to arrive in theaters summer of 201X.

What else? 

Yeah, don't bother seeing it in 3D.  Between all of the rapid editing and dark cinematography, it's not worth it.  The plane scene is effective, but that's about it.

Ah yes, the PG-13 rating.  Zombie movie enthusiasts are up in arms about this.  I didn't mind so much.  It was distracting a couple of times when the filmmakers had to purposefully shoot around the "hard stuff", but it was still pretty brutal for a PG-13 movie.

There it is, a maddening mixed bag.  I hope there will be a faithful adaptation of the book one day (perhaps a cable TV miniseries) but until then we have. . . "The Walking Dead".  And the original book of course.  And about 100 other good zombie movies.  Then, once you're done with those, feel free to check out the "World War Z" movie.  Kurt Cobain versus zombies.