Zombie films are flooding in so thick and fast these days
it’s a wonder that there’s anything original out there; we’ve seen the
classics, the sequels, the parodies, the zom-rom-coms – we’ve seen nazi
zombies, cyborg zombies, voodoo zombies and even an Osama bin Laden zombie, so
why did Brad Pitt and his production team ‘Plan B’ fight so hard to procure the
rights for Max Brooks’ novel World War Z?
Perhaps he wanted to trump Woody Harrelson at being the ultimate destroyer of the
undead, or maybe he just needed somewhere to show off his new haircut? The more
likely answer is that the story had the potential for director Marc Forster
(Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace, etc.) to create something truly epic, on
a scale that encompasses the entire planet (no wonder they had budget
problems).
It’s a global disaster
movie where instead of the ocean, the world is subjected to wave upon wave of the
undead, whose main objective (as with any zombie) is to kill and eat as many of
the population as possible. Pitt plays Gerry Lane, an ex-investigator for the
UN who has to protect his wife (Mireille Enos) and two daughters from the
zombie virus while attempting to discover a cure at the same time. Accompanied
by a scientist and a military squad he travels to East Asia where it is
rumoured that the outbreak first began.
As an action thriller Forster delivers a relatively engaging
contribution to the zombie genre. It’s incredibly fast paced (exactly like the
zombie attacks: if you’re bitten, you turn within fifteen seconds) and any
scenes that don’t involve running or shooting are usually full of breathy and
sometimes incomprehensible exchanges of dialogue. Most of the time this works
in carrying you along with the plot, but the sheer speed of the film is so
limiting to the actors that for the audience, investing any kind of emotion
proves difficult. Pitt never actually has time to give a performance – all he
seems to do is demonstrate his sprinting skills. Same with Peter Capaldi, who
spends his time strutting angrily down the corridors of a medical research
centre in Cardiff.
The zombie genre has always been a perfect vehicle for
reflecting the fears of the contemporary audience through metaphor: in White Zombie (1932) it was slavery,
where the resurrected corpses were forced to work in the sugar cane mills; in
Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), the
zombies attacking the mall represented mass-consumerism, and in more recent
years films like 28 Days Later and [REC] dealt with incurable diseases and
world-wide pandemics. What’s interesting about World War Z (and actually one of its strengths) is that it could
come to resemble our declining economies and the steady rise of unemployment,
or even (and the title gives it away) the fear of another world war. Lane’s
journeying to the army bases of South Korea and Israel evokes the setting and
atmosphere of many present day war films, especially Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, and serves as a reminder that the film is very
much grounded in reality. Apart from a few scenes here and there, the film
never shies away from depicting the brutality of the zombie attack and its
effects: there are moments that are genuinely quite shocking – at least we’re
not given another dumbed-down Die Hard 5.
Pitt made a gamble with World
War Z, but it seems to have paid off. Forster’s directing and Damon
Lindelof’s re-hashing of the script may have angered fans of the original
novel, but the end result is not as terrible or as commercially-driven as it
could have been.
Original source: http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/06/review-world-war-z/
