by Brett Parker
World War Z, the apocalyptic horror novel by Max Brooks, has to be one of the most gripping and intelligent horror tales I’ve ever read. Inspired by Studs Turkel’s The Good War, Brooks used the gambit of wartime interviews to imagine an account of a devastating zombie war on a global scale. As people from around the world recounted how their individual countries dealt with a ramped and hostile zombie threat, Brooks shrewdly illuminated allegorical connections between government incompetence, class warfare, and human negligence. The scary revelation from the work is how the arrogance, carelessness, and cynicism that have hindered our own progress in everyday society would royally screw us over in the face of becoming zombie snack food.
Considering the grand scope of the novel and the way it packs in more troubling ideas than a muckraking political documentary, it would’ve taken a Herculean act from the cinematic gatekeepers for the book to leap to the screen with its dignity intact. So it’s not without a certain Klaus Kinski-like frustration to discover that Marc Forster’s big Hollywood adaptation of the novel pretty much just extracts all the blockbuster elements from the book while completely discarding all the brainier elements and uncomfortable allegories. Yet the fact that the movie turns out to be watchable may be a small miracle in itself. Vanity Fair reported earlier this year how the making of the film was plagued with on-set drama, a ballooning budget, an incoherent first cut, and an expensive, blood-soak ending that had to be completely discarded. The good news is that the final product is able to overcome all of those annoyances to present itself as a surprisingly enjoyable popcorn flick.
As the film opens, we meet Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) a former United Nations employee now living in Philadelphia with his wife (Mireille Enos) and two kids (Sterling Jerins and Abigail Hargrove). As they sit in heavy city traffic one day, a commotion erupts with people running from an unknown threat that soon turns into all-out chaos. As Gerry tries to make sense of his surroundings, he soon discovers that corpses of people are rising up and turning into hostile zombies. Gerry tries protecting his family while hordes of fast-moving and demonic-looking zombies begin chomping on every live human in sight, and a helicopter from the U.N. shows up just in the nick of time to rescue them as the City of Brotherly Love falls to the plagued.
The helicopter flies them off to a U.S. naval fleet off the coast of New York City and it’s there where Gerry learns that a zombie virus is quickly taking over the world. A relentless zombie infection has been spreading on a worldwide scale and countries are rapidly crumbling under the vast reach of this mysterious sickness. Because of his expertise as a former U.N. investigator, Gerry is recruited to help discover the origin of the virus to see if a cure can be found. This journey will take him all over the world to places like South Korea, Jerusalem, and Wales where he’ll meet weary survivors, dodge terrifying zombie attacks, and observe the strange peculiarities of the undead to see if any weaknesses can be spotted.
Once you accept the fact that this movie wants nothing to do with the novel’s intelligence, you’ll find yourself refreshed by the unfussy way it churns out the blockbuster goods then acquits itself like a mob boss who just had his charges dropped. Due mostly to a PG-13 rating that hopes to net wider ticket sales, this zombie flick isn’t so much a horror gore-fest as it is an adventure thrill ride. The big idea is to hop around foreign locales while wheeling out the latest in zombie effects. Of course, none of these global pitstops really say anything significant about foreign governments or cultural reactions to a crisis situation, but as far as zombie thrills go, this is all more entertaining than usual. A scene where zombies frantically pile on top of one another like rats to scale a giant wall in Jerusalem is a truly epic sight and a zombie outbreak on an airplane in flight makes for a golden action sequence. This movie certainly gets brownie points for trying to add creativity and adrenaline to a horror scenario we’ve seen a million times before.
David Fincher once pointed out that Brad Pitt doesn’t really have a towering iconic role such as James Bond or Han Solo to call his own (unless Tyler Durden counts. The Fight Club leader has his own posters, but does he have his own action figure?). So it’s pretty obvious that the producers here are hoping to turn his character into the Indiana Jones of zombie flicks. It’s not a bad sell, really, for Pitt’s weathered calm is a nice balance between the terrified hysteria and nihilistic cynicism we usually get from humans facing the undead. His performance hints at how Robert Redford probably would’ve handled himself in a zombie movie, and those two opposing temperaments between star and material would’ve proved just as compelling as it does here.
The film’s ending is so jarringly an open-ended sequel set-up that we don’t even realize the climax is actually the climax until the ending notes that we just witnessed the climax. There’s definitely a “is that all?” feeling as the end credits approach. Considering that the film clocks in at just under two hours and doesn’t exactly wear out its welcome, I can’t help but wonder if the filmmakers could’ve tacked on the ultraviolent original ending. Reportedly, it revolved around an epic, crimson-covered decapitation fest in Russia where Pitt tore through zombies like Rambo tore through the Vietnamese. Since this is a movie that swings for the popcorn fences, I don’t feel that ending would’ve been terribly frowned upon. Anyways, it’s a testament to the movie we actually have here that it has me looking forward to future installments. I just hope, for the love of Romero, that the sequels study up on the source novel and incorporate the more intelligent and philosophical points from the book into the script. World War Z proves that it’s one of the more fun recent zombie flicks, now it’s time to prove that it can be one of the more thought-provoking ones as well.
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