World War Z
Marc Forster
Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, Damon Lindelof, J. Michael Straczynski (Novel: Max Brooks)
116 min.
Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, Ludi Boeken, Matthew Fox, Fana Mokoena, David Morse, Elyes Gabel, Peter Capaldi, Pierfrancesco Favino, Ruth Negga, Moritz Bleibtreu, Sterling Jerins, Abigail Hargrove, Fabrizio Zacharee Guido
PG-13 for intense frightening zombie sequences, violence and disturbing images
Two genres that have been facing increased popularity in recent years have come together to form what isn’t a more perfect union, but one which highlights the flaws in both. World War Z is one part zombie movie and one part epidemic film.
Brad Pitt plays a former UN investigator whose family is caught up in a world-spamming pandemic that pursues them from New York City into an apartment complex in New Jersey. Taking its cues from Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later…, director Marc Forster starts the film off with a series of chases that entertain and excite, leaving just enough downtime between events to let the audience catch their breaths. But as soon as Gerry Lane, his wife Karin (Mireille Enos), two daughters (Sterling Jerins and Abigail Hargrove) and a young Hispanic boy (Fabrizio Zacharee Guido) they pick up along the way, are rescued by American military helicopters at the behest of his former employer and friend Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena), the film takes a decidedly different path.
Now that the vast population of the world has been largely subsumed by this zombie-like disease, Gerry becomes the perfect man to investigate the origins of the disease in hopes of finding a cure. He embarks on a journey that takes him through North Korea, Israel and Eastern Europe trying to track down either patient zero or some magical cure. The adrenile is still there, just on a smaller, quieter scale where each miniscule sound is potentially life-threatening. This is where World War Z begins to resemble Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. Soderbergh’s film may focus more on the subtle tension of a race to save millions, but Forster infuses the latter half of his film with plenty of violence and excitement to make it somewhat distinctive.
Pitt hasn’t had a lot of opportunities to headline a blockbuster lately and it’s nice to see he’s still up to the task. While Lane has a few raw emotional moments that Pitt carries out masterfully, it’s the fast-paced, rhytmic action segments that showcase his understanding of the medium. It isn’t the performance of the ages, but it’s stronger than a lot of what passes for action acting lately. Enos is given the meatiest, most heartfelt scenes in the film, showcasing why critics were so enamored with her performance on TV’s The Killing. The rest of the cast is largely serviceable, not striking far from genre tropes, though Daniella Kertesz deserves some measure of praise for making the otherwise stereotypical Israeli soldier Segen someone a bit more substantial.
Forster’s past work has been a hodge podge of differing genres and levels of quality. He’s done well separately with comedy (Stranger Than Fiction), relationship dramas (Monster’s Ball) and fantasy dramas (Finding Neverland), but not even his big budget spectacle Quantum of Solace could help him prepare for filming an unwieldy script by Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom, Lions for Lambs), Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, The Cabin in the Woods) and Damon Lindelof (the bane of both the Alien and Star Trek franchises).
The Carnahan/Goddard/Lindelof script is littered with implausibilities, leaps of logic and enough plot holes to make Prometheus look like the most tightly scripted film ever made. Many of the bigger questions don’t pop up until late in the film when the purported “cure” is revealed, but it’s easy to see how disjointed the screenplay is when you compare the film’s sensational opening third and the more haphazardly laid-back/actiony second two-thirds. It’s as if they were writing two different films and decided to merge them at the last moment. The merits of the film barely outweight the clunkiness of the narrative and dialogue, all of which are borrowed from cheesy melodramas that might have fit better on cable television several years ago.
Boyle’s genre reinvigoration 28 Days Later… has the biggest influence on the film at. The way Forster takes the audience through tightly-cramped places and darkened alcoves as it teases your emotions owes a great deal to Boyle’s work. And while Contagion certainly acts as a strong comparison to what Forster attempted with his final two acts, the injections of whiz-bang action and Roland Emmerich-style disaster flare muddles the film more than clarifies it. It creates a further dichotemy between the tightly-woven New York/New Jersey-set events and the global portions that follow.
If you’re a fan of either genre, there’s enough to keep you interested in World War Z. Fans of one or the other might be a little disappointed in where the film starts or goes depending on your view. Everyone else should be both thrilled and puzzled by the film which delivers on entertainment but fails to break the new boundaries it might have been able to under different writers.
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