Directed by Marc Forster

Starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Danielle Kertesz

Grade: C+

Zombies work best as satire. They can be frightening, disturbing, unsettling, and downright horrifying satire, but satire nonetheless. Zombies are brainless consumers, completely selfish and only concerned with their own carnal needs. Basically, they’re us, or at least a metaphor for us. When you reduce the gore, in a blatant marketing attempt to get it down to PG-13 and bring the teenage dollars in, and turn the zombies from an all consuming predator into a virus attempting to spread itself, the horror of zombies is nullified. What World War Z gives us is nothing more than a very suspenseful film that doesn’t add up to anything else.

The story follows Gerry (Brad Pitt), a former United Nations covert mission operative (and if you know what that means you automatically know more than the filmmakers) who is on a mission to find the source of the virus causing the rising of the dead. In his travels, which include South Korea and Israel, he is unable to find the source, or patient zero, because the world has erupted in far too much chaos to do that kind of detective work. Nobody has any answers for Gerry, who because he is Brad Pitt and is the star of the movie always has to be the smartest guy in every room, so he sets out to find a method to fight them. I won’t give away any spoilers here, but let’s just say that his solution isn’t entirely satisfying and poses a lot more logical questions than it gives dramatic solutions, but it does, of course, set up the sequel.

The first act of this movie is actually fairly good. The panic on the streets, the confusion, the terror, all feel very real and immediate. Due to his training, Gerry is calm and focused during the chaos, which allows us, the audience, to deduce what’s going on with him. He gets his family to safety, and then plot takes over. He’s the only man the government, or what’s left of them, trusts to go on this mission to find patient zero. This feels inauthentic, and just an excuse to give the film a reason to keep Brad Pitt as the focus. The second act, despite itself, stays fairly interesting as well. Taking us around the world, we at least get a glimpse, however disappointingly brief, of the global impact of the undead. Fans of the novel will recognize elements of the book during this period. It’s the third act where it really falls apart. The very title, World War Z, suggests a worldwide scope. This is an excellent idea, because all zombies shows and films feel very isolated with only the immediate need for survival on the characters’ minds. Unfortunately, the third act falls into the trap of only following a few people, in a very isolated area, and the massiveness of the devastation feels lessened. This turns the movie into a series of subpar zombie scares instead of an exploration of what it means to have a world war against the living dead.

The characters are pretty much paper thin, never given room to breathe. They only exist to set up the next plot point, the next run in with zombies. Pitt does a serviceable enough job, everybody in the cast does in fact, but there’s just nothing to do. The big emotional scene towards the end should feel a lot more impactful than it does, but it just never earned it. I think there’s a good movie here, but it requires a lot more ambition than is shown here. The film should feel bigger, the zombies should be more horrifying, there were actually a couple unintentional laughs during close-ups of the zombies, and there should be a sense of how silly the whole thing is. The novel had that, as Max Brooks understands satire, but the movie takes itself entirely too seriously. Where the book had fun with all the mythology surrounding zombies, the movie never takes a second to have any fun at all.

To be clear, the movie doesn’t’ fail because it didn’t follow the book very well, it failed because it completely missed the point of the book. The very spirit was altered in order to turn it into a summer blockbuster instead of a contemplative, and sadly funny, look at what it means to be human and just how important our civilization is to us. Also, zombies don’t move fast, they just don’t. Please stop making them run, Hollywood.