Review: ‘World War Z’

Have you ever wanted to see a family friendly movie about a world wide zombie outbreak? Because “World War Z” is here and this is the movie for you (and your whole family). If you aren’t into zombie movies that have all that yucky, disgusting gore and blood and viscera and just general horror, yet you always wanted to see a movie featuring Brad Pitt and a bunch of undead ghouls (but you’ve already seen “Interview With a Vampire” and “Thelma & Louise“), then here you go, this movie was made just for you.

“World War Z” centers on ex-United Nations something or other Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt, Megamind) in Philadelphia, starting another typical day with his family, making breakfast for his wife and two young daughters, so on and so forth, and while sitting in traffic on their way into the city, oh yeah, zombie apocalypse happens. It’s not like it comes completely out of nowhere, as the movie does start with Gerry watching a news broadcast about strange and violent events popping up all around the world, but there was no reason to think that this strange mysterious thing would come to their doorstep so quickly, whatever it was (it was zombies).

So the movie starts with Gerry navigating his family safely during the first hours of a zombie apocalypse, and then hooking up with an old UN buddy who gets him to investigate the source of the outbreak so they could isolate it and find a vaccine. And off Gerry goes, traversing around the world, chasing little clues and rumors, trying to find a way to save the world. Sounds epic, doesn’t it?

And really it IS pretty epic, considering that the movie does start with Brad Pitt making pancakes and next thing you know, intense zombie action going from Philly to the Middle East to Asia and places in between, with the safety of the entire world and the survival of mankind clearly at stake. And they also make sure to let us know that things have outright collapsed all around the planet as governments were too slow to react to such a swift onslaught of disease and violence.

This isn’t a bad movie at all, and actually some of the action sequences are pretty intense. It was interesting how they stuck so closely to Gerry’s point of view and rarely broke away from him and what he was seeing and learning (they did the occasional break away back to his wife and kids safely on a UN boat of some sort), and they definitely went with a real world approach to how people would react to a zombie outbreak, which includes actually admitting that this may indeed be zombies, because the first time the zed-world comes up, people shout it down like “come on, we’re trying to be serious here, why you joshin’ for?” and shit like that.

But it is a remarkably bloodless movie; considering the fact that zombies are all about eating living flesh, spreading the zombie disease that creates more zombies, and suffice to say there would be A LOT of blood associated with such a horrible event, there are just no two ways about it. So for a movie striving for some semblance of realism as a “Contagion” style outbreak film about zombism, it manages to undermine that by being so cleaned up and sanitized for mass consumption though in the end there are only a couple of moments I can really think of that would have benefited from the blood and gore which would have really helped bring home the full horror and terror of the situation. But for a large-scale zombie outbreak movie with an initial budget of $125 million that eventually ballooned to over $200 million? You better believe they were releasing this thing as PG-13 safe as possible.

And of course to make a movie on this scale featuring this many zombies traveling in high speed hoards of undead flesh and bones requires lots of CG and digital zombies, and for most of the movie you can easily tell the difference between actual people and the zombies because the zombies look like fake people made with computers. This is always unfortunate because it is just not as easy to imagine being scared by things obviously created in someone’s computer, as opposed to seeing someone on a set in some very convincing make up. For example, the final sequence set inside a zombie-infected wing of a World Health Organization building does stand out as being delightfully free of computer generated effects and instead just features people in zombie make up over acting and running around and by golly that section is pretty great.

In the end it’s an alright movie, though it is a shame that they picked up the rights to this interesting book and make a movie that is so different. They apparently do have plans for a trilogy, which would allow them to get into the 20-year scope that the book brings, but this movie is going to need to make a shit ton of box office cash before the money men to get off their wallets and fork over more millions to make another one of these things.