Call it the gift of lowered expectations, but zombie apocalypse flick World War Z isn’t as bad as you may have feared following reports of the expensive reshoots and on-set feuds that dogged the production.
It’s not genre-redefining like the novel on which it is based, but World War Z delivers enough thrills to make it worth a visit to the multiplex this blockbuster season. It is a slick globetrotting disaster film that satisfies as FX-driven spectacle, even if it doesn’t have the brain of 28 Days Later or the bite of Zack Synder’s Dawn of the Dead remake.
World War Z is a star vehicle for Brad Pitt, who invested a lot of his own cash into the film through his production company. It’s Pitt’s attempt to set himself as big action brand like Tom Cruise, and in that regard, the US$200m film is a success despite the odds.
Pitt was not on speaking terms with director Marc Forster as they wrapped up the film. But anyone who did not know about this backdrop would probably struggle to see the seams between the original script and the pieces that were added after rewrites and reshoots.
Pitt, who is in just about every frame of the film, stars as devoted family man and former UN troubleshooter Gerry Lane. When a pandemic turns huge swathes of the world’s population into zombies, he is coerced into helping what is left of the American military into uncovering the root causes and possible cures for the plague.
The film that has ended up in theatres bears little resemblance to Max Brooks’s original book, which told its story through a series of first-person accounts. The political allegory of the novel — widely read as a rebuke of American isolationism — has been eviscerated. Any other political meaning in the film was hacked away in post-production so as not to offend audiences in America and Russia, and censors in China.
Though World War Z departs dramatically from Brooks’s novel, his sombre tone and semi-realistic treatment of his subject matter still somehow manages to shine through. At its best moments, the film plays like Contagion for zombies, a contemplation on how governments and people in the real world might act if the dead really did start walking the earth.
Those minutes are enough to make one dream about how Contagion director Steven Soderbergh or Children of Men’s Alfonso Cuarón might have handled it, though World War Z is satisfying on its own, less ambitious terms. Perhaps it’s faint praise, but what we have here isn’t Waterworld War Z, but a competent FX-driven thriller that will do well at the box office.
World War Z trailer (via YouTube):
A director best known for low-key-character focused dramas, Forster’s only other attempt at an action blockbuster was the disappointing James Bond film Quantum of Solace. Here, he shows an eye for startling imagery in a series of imaginative action sequences that make World War Z worth a watch.
From the opening scene of the panicked streets of Philadelphia as the contagion starts to spread, to an eye-popping set piece where teeming zombies pile on top of each to breach high walls surrounding Israel, World War Z offers some of the most intense action sequences I have seen in a blockbuster for a while.
Any amputations, flesh-tearing and maulings happen discretely off-camera — this is a PG13 effort rather than a hard R-rated film like most in the genre — but Forster is enough of a master of suggestion to make each of them hurt, anyway. Its zombies — agile and fast predators rather than shambling shufflers — are terrifying, too.
Pitt’s central performance as the noble, resourceful UN man is engaging enough to make one care about the spectacle, though we’re not really shown much about what he is trying to save beyond his cute children and his ethereal wife (The Killing’s Mirelle Enos). In other words, this film belongs to Pitt and the zombies. The rest of humanity be damned. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
- World War Z opens in SA on 19 July
