By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on Movies: World War Z
WORLD WAR Z (Three Stars)
U. S.: Marc Forster, 2013
Say what you will about World War Z, it’s a damned fast movie—and it‘s got the biggest collection of ravenous zombies ever appearing together anywhere, anyhow. Assembled with panache by producer-star Brad Pitt, by director Marc Forster, and by writers Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard and Damon Lindelof, this wildly expensive and sometimes insanely exciting horror thriller is about a worldwide epidemic of the living dead, and the one man on Earth who can apparently maybe stop it (ex-U.N. troubleshooter Gerry Lane, played by Pitt). It’s something to see, if not something to think (much) about, or to see again.
This movie moves like one of the dozens, no, hundreds, no, millions of rampaging ghouls who have suddenly declared war on humanity (or, as they like to call us, Lunch). Both the zombies and the movie come at us with the unstoppable push and fury of undead gangbangers or accountants These zombies move in a series of crazy skittering, lurching leaps that seem to cover miles of ground and plot in minutes, no seconds, no microseconds—taking over airplanes, hospitals, cities, countries, banging their heads on our car windows, threatening our adorable families, or Gerry’s adorable family (sweet mom Karen played by Mireille Enos, and sweet-pea daughters Sterling Jenns and Abigail Hargrove)—and killing or infecting or eating people with undead gusto and hideous relish and zip.
Zip! We’re in Philadelphia, having an adorable family breakfast. Then zip! suddenly (almost everything in this movie seems sudden) we’re in a City of Unbrotherly Hunger besieged by walking corpses running amok! Zap! We’re bound by helicopter off a roof to a ship in the mid-Atlantic, where Gerry is separated from his family and given the hefty assignment of figuring out what’s going on, and figuring out how to stop it. Zip! We’re in South Korea, dodging corpses. Zippo! We’re in Israel for the big showpiece scene, watching a huge heap of inhuman life (or death) crawling over each other to form a massive, rising wall; Then Zappa! We’re on a plane filled with maddened monsters and shrieking humans and Gerry and an Israeili soldier survivor of the last big scene: Zegen (Daniela Kertesz). And zappa-zippy-zombie! We’re in Wales, in a zombified medical center, just in time for the film’s terror-fix-finale.
World War Z is based on a novel by Max Brooks, the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, and the book — reportedly arranged it as an oral history of the zombie attack—sounds more original than most of the movie. That’s a movie I’d like to see one day, and it also sounds like a film that Marc Forster (the one who made Monster’s Ball and The Kite Runner) might like to make.
Not that I didn’t enjoy at least some of this one. It’s mostly well-written, well cast, well-directed, and genuinely scary at times—though not especially inspiring or ingenious.
But the producer was there when they needed him. A lot of the film’s quality, or at least its sometimes entertaining excess, is probably due to producer-star Brad Pitt, for whom this disaster epic was obviously a labor of zombie-love, as much as of zombie-commerce. Pitt is one actor whose good looks you tend not to hold against him. He’s a guy who, like Paul Newman and Robert Redford (two fathers of some of his performances) kids himself enough to remove what might be a taint of narcissism. Pitt doesn’t usually take the Tom Cruise stud-hero route; he’s done a lot of interesting projects. And though he’s wearing a strange hairdo for this type of role, he makes for a likable hero, if not a plausibly written one.
Why is Gerry Lane undertaking this vast mission mostly by himself? (The movie is a classic star vehicle but maybe it would have been better to have two heroes: one official, and one, the Pitt part, more of a freelancer.) Why is Gerry able to survive one horrendous action scene after another? Why do riots and screamfests break out wherever he goes—besides the fact that he’s a movie star, something producer Pitt exploits continuously. Why don’t the Israeli defenders notice that writhing heap of zombies scaling their wall, or react to it until it’s too late?
Most of all, why did they spend so much money on this? I saw a big chunk of the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead on TV a short while before catching World War Z—and I was amazed again at how much George Romero accomplished with such scant-seeming resources. World War Z, by contrast, is almost top-heavy with spectacle and action, almost gorged with blood and guts. Occasionally that pays off, as in the Tower of Zombies scene in Jerusalem. But like most big movies, especially big horror movies, it could use more character, more dialogue, more ideas, more personality. And maybe one or two, or three hundred, or three thousand, less zombies.
