World War Z is messy, there’s no doubt. At one point a presumably important character slips, falls and shoots himself dead. The reaction to this moment is so muted and dismissive you begin to think, “Okay, maybe that person wasn’t so important?” However, as the story evolves, I found myself increasingly drawn into the narrative, leading up to a final 30-45 minutes that had me wishing there was another hour left in the movie rather than a disappointing montage before the end credits.
Adapted from the bestselling book by Max Brooks, World War Z follows ex-United Nations employee Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) as he’s called back into action after a virus of an unknown origin is turning the world’s population into zombies.
The opening sequence is a mixed bag of tense mayhem and stupidity. We meet Gerry and his wife (Mireille Enos) and two daughters as they chat around the breakfast table, but are soon seen stuck in Philadelphia traffic as The City of Brotherly Love is turned into a war zone.
The infected population is running rampant through the streets and Gerry must get his family to safety. Bobbing and weaving through traffic, he follows a giant truck as it makes a hole through the madness, and it’s only once he decides to take his eyes off the road while driving about 70 miles an hour to tend to his daughter in the back seat that their car gets blindsided. Many of the action sequences suffer from similar moments of stupidity, such as stacking luggage to fend off a hoard of these indestructible monsters whose fingers still twitch after being burned alive. Yeah, preeeeetty sure that’s not going to work.
The story takes shape once Gerry’s phone rings. “We need you Gerry,” says Fana Mokeona as Gerry’s former U.N. boss in a moment where you already wish Gerry was still with the U.N. and didn’t need to be called back into action like some Superman whose hung up his cape.
Hoping to be saved soon, Gerry and his family are on the run and the military is doing everything they can to rescue them. A chase through a dark, Newark apartment complex is harrowing and director Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace) treats us to some great aerial moments along with a little too much unstable, handheld camerawork that wrecks havoc on your eyes when viewed in 3-D.
Safely aboard an aircraft carrier, Gerry gets his orders and sets out to search for the origin of the virus, which first takes him to South Korea, then to Israel and further around the world, providing a better understanding of the global scale of the devastation, but it isn’t until the final third that it really finds its footing, which is odd considering this final third wasn’t part of the original screenplay.
Much has been made about the production woes of World War Z, which required multiple release date delays and a subsequent seven weeks of reshoots following a complete rewrite of J. Michael Straczynski and Matthew Michael Carnahan‘s original script. Screenwriters Damon Lindelof (Prometheus) and Drew Goddard (Cloverfield) came aboard and delivered 60 pages of new material and to no surprise it results in the most cohesive portion of the film, which is why the rather abrupt ending is so jarring and a bit of a letdown.
Pitt is obviously the film’s driving force and very few others are given much of a chance to deliver any kind of performance. I would have enjoyed seeing more of James Badge Dale as a Navy SEAL Gerry encounters early on as Dale’s ability to capture our attention in a matter of minutes (as evidenced by Flight last year) is uncanny and I liked Enos as Pitt’s wife, but I’ll be damned if they didn’t make her character out to be a sniveling cry baby when she really could have been a symbol of motherly strength.
World War Z succeeds in managing to not focus on the zombie-style gore and mayhem while also providing an understanding of the devastation the outbreak has caused. Many of today’s PG-13 films have run into issues with context as the death of the population is largely ignored while destruction is front and center. Here, death has a face — the rotting, teeth chattering face of the undead — and the weight is felt by the characters and their struggle to stop the spread of the virus.
Considering the production woes and the ballooning budget as a result, I don’t expect a World War Zequel, but had all the pieces of this story of the zombie apocalypse come together a little better I have no doubt we not only would have seen one, we would have demanded one, and the fact I would have sat through another 60 minutes tells me it was worth the watch.
