Multicultural swarms of CGI people are attacking and the planet is helpless to stop them, until Brad Pitt decides he’s had enough. Or so goes the slim plot of World War Z (American title: World War Zee), which shoehorns a stoic Pitt into a variety of global set pieces as he attempts to traces the origins of this undead plague which ravages the globe. Based on the book by Max Brooks (son of Mel!), WWZ drops any social/political commentary in favour of levels ripped straight from a video game. Pitt arrives in a new country just in time for it to be overridden by zombies. He then learns where he has to go next, and is lucky enough to witness some small detail which clues him in on how to stop the virus. And he does all that with about 12 lines of dialogue. Pathetically unimpressive stuff.
This article appears in Jun 20-26, 2013.
A waste of potential that’s almost criminal in it’s immensity. At its worst it’s little better than any other CGI driven snuff epic (the execrable “2012” leaps to mind) A few average set pieces stand out. The tacked on 3rd act in the Cardiff medical facility pays homage to Hitchcock’s “The Birds” but that’s about it. Like most summer blockbusters it takes great liberties with the laws of physics and basic human biology, further emphasising the paucity of imagination in the direction and writing. Max Brooks only asked the reader to make one big leap of faith and everything else in his book neatly fell into place with a realism that was not forced. I understand the need to take on the Zombie genre from a different angle, but I’m not certain that making it antiseptically bloodless is the proper way to go.
I’d love to see exactly what wound up on the cutting room floor. Might be a halfway decent mini-seriews in there, somewhere.