World War Z - ★★★★½
WARNING: This review contains spoilers.
Alas, a zombie movie that finally makes them terrifying.
Let me first establish that I have absolutely no problem at all with AMC’s The Walking Dead - I think it’s brilliantly written, brilliantly adapted, and definitely brilliantly executed; that being said, zombies that walk and are as easy as avoiding by running away aren’t scary. Marc Forster opts to avoid this drag of a movie monster and makes Max Brooks’ zombies come to life (bad wording) in a legitimately scary way.
Forster gets into the meat of the film right off the bat, beginning with a generic implication that what Brad Pitt’s Gerry Lane used to do, before settling down for his family’s sake, was impressive and skillful. In the blink of an eye, we get our first taste of the totally aware, totally fast, totally suspicious zombies. Suspicious? Be it The Walking Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, or even Resident Evil, zombies have one thing on the brain: brains. They want to eat living flesh, yet somehow leave enough for their food to become one of them; however, Brooks’/Forster’s zombies simply infect people and move on, spreading, as the film puts it, like a pathogen. Now we have our first key difference between WWZ and every other zombie film.
Lane’s family is rescued by his good friend in the UN, Lane in particular being saved by a young boy whose family housed his temporarily. This all leads to Lane essentially being blackmailed into taking a young doctor into a known infection zone in order to try and figure out the origin, and cure, for said pathogen; cue the first big LOL in the film as mankind’s one true hope slips in the rain and shoots himself in the head - I’m serious. Following this, we have another zombie attack, and the pattern becomes obvious at this point: zombie attack, figure something out, zombie attack, figure something out, plane ride, zombie attack, figure something out, plane ride, zombie attack, etc.
Somehow amidst all the zombies and people running around in a giant stampede, Lane is able to use some peculiar hyper observance to note there are individuals who the zombies seem to avoid. He saves Daniella Kertesz’s Segen with a lucky guess after she is bit on the arm, decides he’s going to get rid of a plane full of zombies by crashing it, and the two finally find themselves at the doors of W.H.O. in Cardiff. We now found ourselves at the second key difference that sets WWZ apart.
Lane plays a hunch that the zombie plague works exactly like a pathogen, in that it needs a live host to thrive - the people that the zombies avoided surely, then, must have been terminal. To test his theory, Lane miraculously avoids some 80 odd undead to inject himself with a deadly, but curable, disease and finds he is able to walk right past the zombies - it’s not a cure, it’s camouflage.
Although I have never read Brooks’ source material, it is safe to say that Forster did a captivating adaptation of it. Pitt is able to convey each of his actions as necessary for humanity, and all towards the betterment of his family’s safety; the rest of the supporting cast stand meager in Pitt’s shadow, but each provides enough conviction in their limited screen time. Admittedly, it’s always saddening to have little character background and ask the audience to trust the hero’s skills; however, Pitt does nothing short of convincing the audience that Lane is cut out for the job.
The last Marc Forster film I can call to mind is 2008's Quantum of Solace, which was a tarnish in Daniel Craig’s reputation as 007, and I feared that World War Z would carry too much of that gunfire and combat, rather than story; however, Forster balances out the two fairly evenly, despite having had to do so by literally dividing scenes between action and plot.
The film comes to a close as any typical zombie movie does: with a rushed montage of clips showing people being handed the cure, and others suddenly gaining the fighting advantage against the hordes of undead. However, Z ends with a Brad Pitt touch, making it evident that he agreed to do this film for the underlying message: “Help each other.”
If a zombie apocalypse is what it takes for humanity to work together, then … forget that, man.
