World War Z is the zombie’s genre first real attempt at a
big budget action blockbuster. World War Z’s giant budget has given it the
ability to do what few zombie movie can, bringing the zombie apocalypse to a
worldwide scale. For the most part World
War Z works, it balances its action packed thrills, with intense and
suspenseful moments that are paced well throughout the film. This all however maybe comes at the expense
of the film’s heart.
For a movie that was apparently riddled with issues during
production and almost didn’t even get made, even having a Vanity Fair article written about the film’s production missteps, however among a disastrous film
production a comparable zombie movie emerges.
World War Z follows former U.N. investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) as he searches the globe for a cure to stop the zombie apocalypse. This worldwide search for a vaccine lends
itself to some impressive and widely varied action set pieces.
One of the big questions when you have a zombie movie is,
what kind of zombies are we dealing with? Is it your typical run of the mill
slow walking zombies, or the hyper rabies zombies? World War Z’s zombies most closely resemble
the hyper rabies zombies, with the turn time after bite being incredibly fast,
faster than any other zombie movie I’ve seen.
The fast moving disease lends itself to the movie’s scale and intensity
and make for some interesting moments in the film. For the most part all the zombie stuff is
believable with a few small potholes popping up here and there but never really
distract the viewer and the movie is still able to maintain it’s suspension of
disbelief.
The writing in World War Z is good enough to get by, but
ultimately where the movie has its biggest issue is its inability to make Gerry’s
relationship with his family anything more than generic. This wouldn’t be so much of an issue if the
movie didn’t take so much time emphasizing family and bringing up the fact that
Gerry has a family whenever it can.
There’s nothing that stands out about his relationship with his family,
leaving that whole storyline rather uninteresting. Causing the movie to lose some of its heart
and personality along the way. I would
be remiss if I forgot to mention the painfully bad inner monologue by Pitt’s
character at the end of the movie.
The thing that stands out about World War Z is its use of
suspense, which makes for some intense and thrilling sequences. World War Z not only features the traditional
run n’ gun/shoot ‘em up zombie scenes but also intricate and well
presented stealth scenes that make for suspenseful moments. World
War Z should also be commended for being able to break new ground for the
zombie genre. Able to put that
obscenely large 200+ million dollar budget to some use, by not just plugging
and chugging the typical zombie movie set pieces into the film. Instead it takes the zombie action set pieces
to places that the low budget zombie movies are never able to go.
After World War Z’s opening weekend they have already
announced a sequel, which follows Pitt’s plan of hoping to turn the movie into
a trilogy. As a big fan of the zombie
genre (I’m the person who watches all those zombie short films on youtube) I
was genuinely surprised by World War Z and look forward to see what direction
Pitt guides this trilogy as both a producer and an actor. World War Z is impressive, smart and sure to entertaining
enough to overcome it’s lack of heart to create one of the biggest zombie
movies to date.
Rating: 72/100
