Everyone should really have a zombie preparedness plan. It's only a matter of time until the shuffling undead crowd our streets. I know I have my own plan. When the outbreak hits, I'm going to meet my friends Elise and John at Stone Mountain in Atlanta. From there we will venture to the woods and live like Swiss Family Robinson. With shotguns. I'll be team leader, of course. A huge ZZ Top beard will bedeck my chin and a ridiculously large revolver will swing low on my hip. John will be demolitions man/sniper and Elise...she's going to cook. She makes these amazing cloud cookies and, since I'm pretty sure she's the only one with the recipe, I don't want her fighting those drooling monsters.
Yeah, it's a nice fantasy. I understand why zombies are all the craze right now. When the world ends, it all goes back to zero. Too big a balance on your credit card? Did you buy one too many pairs of Christian Louboutins? No problem. You can wear those babies till the heels come off and no creditors will come calling. Who cares about how many LinkedIn connections you have? No one's hiring for entry level or middle management now. No matter how far ahead or behind we may feel, everything we found to be important is gone. Survival is the name of the game and, walking through a Wal-Mart, you'll probably pass by the cheap DVD bin and head straight for the batteries and Power bars. The gaudy commercialism is just an echo of a former world.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but the zombie apocalypse hasn't happened and it probably won't happen for quite some time. The Wal-marts of the world are still up and running and their shelves are filled...with zombies. There are zombie videogames, zombie t-shirts, and zombie movies and TV shows. I've even seen zombie dolls for the morbid little tykes. We are inundated with the undead and it's getting annoying.
Thus, as I walked into the theatre for World War Z, the film already had some points against it. Take an oversaturated film genre, give it a screenwriter I despise (Damon Lindelof), and give Marc Forster, one of the most mediocre directors in Hollywood, the helm. All these things added up to a film I would rather avoid. Still, I gave it a shot for my man Brad Pitt's sake and, I must say, I was not disappointed. While it has its problems, World War Z is a competent, big-budget action film. The story is tight, if a bit predictable. The dialogue is natural, if too expositional at times. And, surprisingly, Marc Forster knows how to direct a sweeping, big-budget blockbuster.
Back in the early days of the zombie flick, everything was very small. In the first modern zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, the narrative takes place in and around a little farmhouse. In the sequel, Dawn of the Dead, the survivors opt for an empty mall, a much larger space. Still, it is one enclosed space. Even a film like 28 Days Later restricts its environment to London and the surrounding cities. In the early scenes of World War Z, we know that we are in for a much larger zombie film— perhaps the first "epic" zombie film. Brad Pitt's Gerry Lane and his family sit in Philadelphia traffic when the outbreak occurs. Large trucks crunch into one another, cars flip end over end, and hundreds, thousands of running slobbering creatures crawl over the entire mess. There is more death and destruction in this opening scene than in all the George A. Romero zombie films combined. Yep, it's big.
And it doesn't stop there. Pitt's character must travel all over the world to track down the cure for this dangerous infection. Imagine Steven Soderberg's Contagion with 20 times the budget. That's the plot. In Max Brooks' novel, there is no central character, and the reader is given only vignettes of the destruction, instead of one narrative. In Forster's film, this structure is mostly abandoned, but not completely. As Pitt ventures from the Indian Ocean to South Korea to Israel, we see how different communities have reacted to the viral outbreak. Pitt acts almost as a travelling narrator, and we feel the influence of Brooks' original story.
That's pretty much all Pitt has to do. Sadly, there isn't much of a character in Gerry Lane. He's handsome, smart, and he knows how to duct tape knives to stuff. And...That’s it. As always, the movie star is entertaining and likable and, even when his character feels flat, you still want to cheer for the guy. Considering the rumors that Forster and Pitt stopped talking on the set, it is clear that Pitt is acting alone. We get to see all his old tricks. My favorite is the one where he feels overwhelmed, looks up, and starts to cry. He does the same in Babel, Legends of the Fall, and The Assassination of Jesse James. Hey, it works for the guy and Gerry Lane comes across as a loving father who wants to kick some ass.
While Forster attempts to add some sweet character moments between Lane and his family, they are swallowed by the surrounding story. The film feels like a cross between Zero Dark Thirty, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Day of the Dead. Forster never has had a very recognizable directorial style and, in World War Z, he clearly borrows his subdued tones and hyper-realistic style from directors like Kathryn Bigelow and Paul Greengrass. There are moments when the computer-generated effects overcome the realistic tone, but, for the most part, it is all believable and exciting. Forster clearly understands how too many visual effects can lose an audience's attention, so he sticks to real stunt performances and practical effects. The zombie actors deserve credit for their shaky and unsettling silent performances. Many of them look like corpses doing the Robot. This really is a new type of zombie and, for the first film in a long time, the genre feels fresh.
Still, there is something missing. Maybe it's the extra hour of story the film crew shot. Maybe it's actors like Matthew Fox who show up for one scene and clearly have more backstory sitting on a cutting room floor somewhere. Overall the film feels somewhat thrown together. Like Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate or Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, this is what is left after 350 million dollars and years of production woes. The film works, but it seems as if this is all they had to show. The film fits together as a story, but just barely. The supposed craziness of the shoot does not translate to the screen as it did with Apocalypse Now. Instead, World War Z comes across as cold and a bit lifeless. Pun intended.
I guess it's unfair to judge a film for what happened behind the scenes. As a goreless and bloodless zombie film, World War Z is just fine. The film is superior to many of the messy blockbusters of 2013. The story is simple and the action is exciting. In the end, Brad Pitt does okay in the zombie apocalypse. Still, he would probably be better off with someone to bake him cloud cookies. Sorry Brad, my zombie preparedness plan is much better than yours.
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