World War Z

I’m not really a big fan of zombie films. It’s not because of zombie fatigue, even though they’ve become ubiquitous in entertainment and culture this past decade. Rather, the problem I have is one inherent in the genre: They’re not very good enemies. It’s a little hard to believe slow, ambling corpses could overrun armed humans and topple civilization. The zombie movie I found most plausible (and I use that term relatively) was the spoof Shaun of the Dead because (SPOILER!) humanity actually defeats the undead, and the world returns to normal.

More recent movies have raised the stakes by making zombies move like sprinters on speed. World War Z ups the ante even more, throwing at us literally tidal waves of zombies that wash away vehicles like small objects, and pile on top of each other to reach over giant walls or scale tall buildings. Cool to see, but the tradeoff is ignoring things like the laws of physics. But hey, it’s a zombie movie. You’re already suspending your disbelief enough to believe the dead can come back to life, so what’s a little more suspension for entertainment’s sake?

The film is based on the 2006 book of the same name by Max Brooks. The book is presented as an oral account from the survivors of a zombie outbreak that nearly wiped out the human race, and the fight to reclaim the world from the living dead (think Studs Terkel with zombies). Such a narrative structure works very well. Not only do the first-person anecdotes put a real human spin on a purely horror-sci-fi scenario, but it also gives us many details of a fictional world history without getting very deep into technical descriptions. Also, the world events Brooks describes actually seem pretty plausible, like a manual of how real people and governments might really react to such an event.

However, this structure is dropped in the film, not even used as a framing device, and the movie instead presents a straight-forward linear story. In it, former U.N. agent Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) is driving his family through Philadelphia when the streets suddenly fill with zombies, an epidemic that seems to be happening all over the world. Gerry and family barely escape the U.S. and arrive at a fleet of military ships in the Atlantic (apparently, zombies can’t swim). From there, Gerry must travel to different corners of the planet to try to discover what caused the outbreak and find a cure.

Most zombie movies never seem to show the apocalypse actually happen, always beginning sometime after the fact. In World War Z, we get to see it. The initial attack on the streets of Philly and a dramatic escape from a Newark skyscraper are impressive scenes, epic in scope like few zombie films ever were before (this one’s got the budget; some, maybe most, couldn’t afford to stage such sequences). But the scenes without zombies, as survivors pillage stores and hide or flee, have a doomsday dread that might be even more intense than the scenes with them. For the first half hour, the movie builds up quite a bit of tension.

Alas, the rest of it never lives up to the opening. There’s one more impressive action spectacle in a fortified, walled-off Jerusalem. The rest of the time, in more closed quarters, it’s pretty generic zombie fare, with the protagonists sneaking about and being chased, a few jumps here and there but nothing truly scary (the movie fits more in the action genre than horror).

What’s there is done well enough to be adequately entertaining, but there’s not a lot of meat to chew on. Most of the sociopolitical content of Brooks’ tome is just mentioned in passing or eliminated, and there’s none of the social commentary fans might expect from George A. Romero, the father of the modern zombie picture. Very little time spent fleshing out the characters, either. Pitt is a strong lead, evoking a battle-hardened stoicism and determination, but he moves too fast to really get know anyone, and those around him don’t really last too long.

There’s also very little gore (obviously toned down to get a more commercial PG-13), and in this respect it seems like something’s missing. I may not be a big fan, but I’m pretty sure part of the appeal of zombie pictures is the way they push the envelope for creative and vomit-inducing gore, and not feeling guilty about it because they’re already dead. Removing all blood changes the experience and also makes the action seem choppy, like watching a violent movie edited for television (though this could also be a result of the frantic pace of some scenes). I guess we’ll have to wait for an unrated home video version to see WWZ in all its glory.

This one’s pretty vanilla, but it’s vanilla done well, on a sometimes massive scale. Zombie fans will enjoy it, though it’s a diet zombie picture that’s might leave hungry hardcore fans for whom bloodier is better.