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Yet, while some of World War Z is rotten, the whole stands as a punchy, if conventional action thriller. Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a UN inspector chosen to investigate the source of a viral outbreak that has quickly, mercilessly zombified 3 billion people. His search for Patient Zero will take him from New York to South Korea to Jerusalem (you can see how the budget clocked up) to – finally – Wales, the little country that could in the war against the undead. It's a bleak, serious travelogue of humanity on the turn. Zero Dark Thirty for z-heads.
Romero loyalists may want to look away. WWZ's zombies (or "Zekes" as the military have it) are super fast and super strong. They'll have your jugular agape in a jiffy (bloodlessly mind – the film has been edited to catch a PG13 in the US – a decision that slips from odd to loopy to farcical as the devastation ramps up). At the sight of live flesh, Zeke'll swarm and flow like ants from a bust nest. Forster – marshalling his first big shoot since the Quantum of Solace kerfuffle – has a great time shooting mass panic. The bigger set pieces – the storming of Jerusalem via a giant zombie pile-on for example – are of the Roland Emmerich school of crowd dynamics. The more screaming, the more stampeding, the better.
It's only when the zombies' groans stop that yours are likely to start. World War Z's slow sections are draggy and predictable. Gerry's relationship with his family (ensconced on a navy cruiser off the coast of Washington) is a paltry scrap of emote-a-bait. His relationships with other survivors – an attempt to introduce a Walking Dead-style sense of fragility perhaps – are hampered by their tendency to get eaten a beat or two after we meet them. Brad Pitt, who accumulates a wacky homemade armour of magazines and gaffer tape, is slowly unveiled as Jesus among the chompable. The saviour of those who'll tumble under a bite or two.
The final third (the section that was rewritten by Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof) sees the film skid from goreless actioner to teeny-bopper horror, with Gerry and the gang creeping around a World Health Organisation lab that may hold the secret to humanity's salvation. It's out of kilter with the rest of the film, but it at least gives us time with the zombies face-to-face. Until then they've been a blur – a brainless, check-less mass of rage. Up close they are – as with most iterations of their kind – clumsy and rather tragic.
World War Z is not a brilliant addition to the zombie lore. But it's also not the shuffling mess it was rumoured to be. It's an attempt at large-scale seriousness in a genre that's frequently preposterous. It stumbles along on that intention. An early scene has Gerry holed-up in an apartment, pleading with his fellow survivors to make a run for it, despite the horde scrabbling at the door. "Movement is life," he says. "Movement is life." The humans don't listen: they pay the price. But Forster – intent on drowning out the doubters with cacophonous destruction – is all about speed and spectacle. He, at least, has taken Gerry's motto to heart.
| Release Date | : | Jun 21, 2013 |
| Runtime | : | |
| Genres | : | Action, Drama, Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller |
| Production Company | : | Paramount Pictures, GK Films, Skydance Productions,Hemisphere Media Capital, Apparatus Productions, Latina Pictures, 2DUX² |
| Production Countries | : | United States of America, Malta |
| Casts | : | Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Abigail Hargrove, Sterling Jerins, James Badge Dale, Elyes Gabel, David Andrews, Daniella Kertesz, Ludi Boeken, Fana Mokoena, Fabrizio Zacharee Guido |
| Plot Keywords | : | apocalypse, zombies, nuclear weapons, flesh eating zombie,multiple perspectives, zombie apocalypse |
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