World War Z
We’ve read the book1 so now it’s movie time. Brad Pitt stars as the expert trying to stop the zombie outbreak.
It’s almost useless comparing the book and the film given that they have so little in common. A faithful adaptation would have been a found footage documentary style film, interviewing the people who survived the zombie war. You probably could have made it for $50m. It was always going to be a tricky book to adapt, so the decision to simply throw the source material in the bin is not surprising.
Instead we get a pretty standard Hollywood blockbuster where Brad Pitt slashes his way through zombies to find a cure.
Along with the stench of rotting zombie flesh comes the whiff of budget over-runs, re-shoots and panic re-writes. It’s a lot of big money scenes and location work but with a weak story that just plods from A to B to C. Brad flies a plane, rides bicycles, drives an RV… all sorts of cool shit but every scene is pretty low stakes given that he isn’t going to die, and his family are locked away safe. His family didn’t even need to be in the film.
That being said the action set pieces had a good sense of rhythm and momentum, and in isolation they worked quite well. I’m not sure Brad Pitt was the right man for the job but he is good at running forwards while looking backwards, an important job in a film like this.
Zombie movies (and perhaps horror movies more broadly) tend to struggle with knowing how to end, and this one suffers in the final third where there’s a real anti-climax of an ending. Just like this review.