Starring: Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos
Review (with SPOILERS): This was a pretty solid action movie that had it’s strong and weak points. It isn’t a perfect film, but it could have been a lot worse. You’ll enjoy it as long as you don’t think too hard about a few things. As with a lot of stories with their good and bad points, I found that this review simply refused to coalesce into a coherent piece, so I have to resort to the old crutch of using bullet points.
- Very little to do with the novel: Let’s get this out of the way first: The film shares little more than a title with the World War Z novel by Max Brooks. The novel is great and I recommend it to everyone who is a fan of zombie fiction. If you saw the movie first, don’t hesitate to pick up the book because the two couldn’t be more different. The film is a break-neck action movie with fast zombies and an actual main character. The novel is a collection of interviews that take place AFTER the slow zombies have been put down; those interviews were compiled by a nameless UN employee who is creating a historical account of the zombie war and the interviews give a solid world-view of a zombie crisis from its inception until its solution.
- Not really about zombies: Honestly, this isn’t really even a zombie movie. These creatures are much more like the “Infected” from 28 Days Later. They are fast and they “turn” within about 10 second of being bitten, so a single infected individual can create a HORDE in mere moments. As an aficionado of zombie fiction, there are some big storytelling differences between fast and slow zombies. Slow, Romero-zombies allow the main characters to find shelter, barricade the doors and then develop drama within the group of survivors. Romero-zombies are really just tools to force people into a confined place and tell stories about how they fight. Fast zombies are very different because the protagonists are always running for their lives. There is never any chance to rest and decide that you want to steal the ham sandwich from the person sitting next to you or to decide that you don’t much like the people of a different race or nationality who are in the bunker with you. Honestly, I prefer Romero-zombies because I think they offer more storytelling possibilities, but fast zombies can be exciting when they are used correctly (as they are in WWZ). The zombies in WWZ also aren’t eating anyone. They just want to bite and pass on their infection. This DOES remove some of the horror from the film because it isn’t even clear that the zombies are dead. Several characters mention losing loved ones, but it is no where near as horrible as watching a family member pulled apart and eaten alive by Romero-zombies.
- A couple big zombie innovations: If you’ve seen the previews for this film, you’ve see the zombie swarms. It is really cool how the zombies keep climbing on top of the buddies in front of them until they scale a wall. It makes total sense, but it isn’t something I’ve seen before with zombies. The other very clever zombie scene is on a plane. After everyone thinks they are safe (assuming they can find somewhere to land), a zombie emerges from the elevator and starts infecting people. Gerry sees this happening from behind the first-class curtain and the folks up there start stacking luggage against the curtains. Eventually, the zombies break through and it leads to a very explosive scene. Zombies on a plane!
- Brad Pitt is really good: Maybe it’s because we’ve gotten so used to him being the Daddy to the babies that Angelina Jolie accumulates, but I really bought Brad Pitt in his role as a caring father. This role becomes important because his character, Gerry, is a retired “UN inspector”. He doesn’t want to go out and investigate the source of the zombie plague, but the surviving authorities make it clear that his family will not be allowed to remain safe on the navel vessels if he doesn’t go. The other thing that I like about the movie is that they don’t make Gerry out to be any sort of super-soldier. He’s just a dude who knows how to stay alive in places like Somalia and Chechnya. Imagine if this was a Tom Cruise movie??? Cruise would have been great for the “running away from zombies” scenes because Cruise always has at least one sprinting scene in every movie, but we also would have been force-feed a few scenes of Cruise defeating zombies in with zombie-fu. Ugh.
- Great depiction of a zombie panic: Most zombie movies don’t actually show the “shit hits the fan moment” when people start to loot stores and turn on each other. WWZ thrusts us right into the middle of the mayhem and you can really feel the panic. Probably the most surreal moment was when everyone was looting a supermarket and Gerry has to shoot a guy who is trying to rape his wife. Immediately a uniformed policeman appears and you kinda worry that Gerry is going to get arrested, but the cop is just there to loot some canned goods like everyone else. It’s funny what a great visual shorthand a looting policeman is! That image tells you that it is REALLY bad if even cops are joining in on the looting.
- Good set pieces: Most of the movie is just moving from one set-piece action scene to the next. They all involved the zombies to one extent or another, but they’re really well done. Seeing the zombies over-run one safe zone after another also puts you in the mindset of seeing humanity being wiped out. It really is depressing. Much of the action is shot with really quick and abrupt cuts. On one hand, I don’t like fast cuts because I really want to see what is happening. But, it is effective in this setting because the main characters are running for their lives and don’t have time to watch.
- Kinda strange ending: The ending for WWZ reminded me a little of Prometheus last summer where you could see the effects of a script rewrite and the fact that new footage was shot. There are a couple of story elements that seem important earlier in the film, but never really pay off. I assume they were in the ending that we DIDN’T see. For example, much is made of the ~10 seconds it takes a bitten person to turn, and Gerry uses this knowledge to save an Israeli soldier by quickly amputating her arm after she is bitten. The solider becomes his traveling companion–until she vanishes at the end of the movie without a trace. So the whole “10-second to turn” thing was mostly used to save the life of a character who never ended up really mattering to the story? Weird…
Conclusion: Overall, this is an entertaining summer movie. As a fan of the novel, it wasn’t all I hoped for, but then, I’m not sure how to make a 2-hour movie from that novel anyway. It would make an awesome HBO miniseries though. It’s worth the money to go see it.
Grade: B
– Dean Stell
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