With a troubled stop-start production spanning over 5 years from the initial script stage, through several rewrites, shoots and re-shoots, and finally released last Friday, World War Z is a perfectly OK way to spend 2 hours and a perfectly unnecessary way to spend $200 million on a genre that never needed it.
Brad Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a former U.N employee drafted back into service when a worldwide zombie pandemic causes general mayhem in every corner of the globe. Thankfully, Pitt does the American leading man thing very well and so his performance is one of very few things gluing this messy film together. The blatant cracks discernable in a project with so many writers and producers become less of a problem as the story progresses. We know we’re rooting for Gerry Lane – barely anything else makes sense – so Pitt’s performance is the one straight arrow we can hang onto.
I can live with the directionless narrative. I’m sure some people involved in the film are devastated with how incoherent World War Z’s story is but I’d rather a film aimed for Hollywood thriller formula and missed than put me to sleep with a gentle lead through tension/release/tension/release. What did kill the film for me was any element of the ‘Action’ genre thrown into the mix, which diluted the sense of threat and dread that a good zombie film can imbue.
Big explosions, plane crashes, helicopter shots of citywide inferno, pacey cutting sequences showing swarms of undead braineaters encroaching on Israel. All looked so expensive to make and yet had so little dramatic impact. I remain unconvinced by sprinting zombies whose presence ensures only that their victims have less time to feel terrified and spend more time being eaten than running away.
The film takes an unexpected turn for the better half an hour from the end when, after another expensive-looking set piece involving an exploding grenade on a commercial flight, Gerry Lane finds himself crash landing next door to a World Heath Organization facility in Cardiff – actual Cardiff, in Wales. From my limited research I understand that at this point, the writing credit switches (for the nth time), this time to long-time Joss Whedon collaborator, Drew Goddard, which might explain why the film suddenly seems to tighten up. The maze of corridors in the WHO facility is the perfect playground for the undead.
Not only does Pitt have to sneak past the infested area to retrieve some *important items* but the zombies have slowed down considerably. Described now as ‘inactive’, they amble around with the traditional clumsy sloth of the zombies in classic horror films and, for the first time, we get to have a few clear 10-second close-ups of the creatures. Not surprisingly, this is the scariest sequence of the film. Ridden with tension and wrapped in a lucid goal-orientated narrative, after nearly 2 hours, World War Z actually begins to get… exciting…
And then it ends.
Jon Bates Writes 