Where's the war?

Rating: 4/10 (23 June 2013)

Let me start by giving a summary of the book: A journalist travels the world AFTER the zombie outbreak to interview different people from different countries to see how they handled this massive infestation. It gives points of view from different characters on how they handled themselves and uses real-world scenarios to show realistically how such a thing would be combated.
On to the movie: Where did ANY of this go? First of all, instead of showing how DIFFERENT people handle this situation, it shows how ONE MAN handles it. Brad Pitt. For a movie that seems to want to be taken seriously as true-to-life, it sure does fail when it introduces the premise that somehow a RETIRED UN investigator is the most important man in the world and the only one who can save it. If such were the case, why send him out with ONLY a handful of soldiers instead of a small army of Special Forces? Also, why introduce this young, brilliant doctor as the possible hope for humanity if he is only going to idiotically shoot himself in the first thirty minutes of the movie? To me it seemed like Brad Pitt said: "Woah, wait a minute. You can't let a dorky doctor save the world. I'm the hero! Kill him off!", stamped his foot, and went to pout in a corner. I had heard that Pitt (the producer) and Forster (the director) were at odds through the entire filming, so the script had to be re-written several times to accommodate Pitt's hissy fits, so I'm slow to blame Forster for this awful "adaptation".
The zombies: LOL! These zombies are everything you'd expect if Disney decided to do a Pixar zombie film. Most of them are done using CGI, and the ones who are actual actors are completely non-scary and laughable. Gnashing their teeth like poorly acted Cenobytes from the Hellraiser series. In order to sell more tickets, they opted for a PG-13 rating, so there is no blood and I don't remember seeing a zombie kill a single person. How do you make a zombie movie when the antagonist which is supposed to strike fear into our hearts just seems like a football game gone horribly wrong? Super fast running and lots of flying tackles does not for a zombie apocalypse make.
The plot: I know this movie was trying for something different, and failed horribly. They should have just called it "28 Months Later". The supposed plot twist at the end, which was re-written 4 or 5 times, seemed put together at the last minute, and as if the writers just said: "eh, screw it. Just do this and release the movie so we can get a paycheck." Anyone who thinks that making it a metaphor for the current state of events and painting the UN into the saviors of humanity is something new has obviously not seen the FAR superior District 9. I will not get into all the other plot holes so monstrous you could drive a bus through them.
The acting: Who are these people? Why should we care about them? Their performances are wooden. They have such small roles because Brad Pitt seems to want to hog all the screen time, and even then his own performance is stilted and lackluster. He lacks any sort of emotion and I never once felt that I could connect to his character at all. The filmmakers would have done a much better job if he'd been introduced as an average joe.
Summary: I see a lot of people praising the action in this movie, but I found it extremely boring. Any action presented was the same: "Brad Pitt goes to new country, Brad Pitt gets attacked, Brad Pitt saves a handful of people, Brad Pitt runs to new country". For the overbloated budget, this movie offered nothing new or refreshing. On top of that, it could not even succeed as a good zombie film. Movies like 28 Days Later, The Horde, and hell, even Cockneys vs. Zombies show that a great zombie film does not need a huge budget to make it great. This was simply Pitt's and Hollywood's attempt at taking something people love (zombies) and cashing in on it. The 7.4 rating I see this movie had must have been paid for, because 9/10ths of the user reviews I see for this film are just BAD! Same as the film itself. The good reviews I see praise it as "The Best Zombie Movie I've Seen"  which leads me to believe they haven't seen ANY zombie movies before, and that the movie is "Intelligent and Realistic", which if you see my above points, just isn't the case. Usually I am very forgiving in terms of movies lacking realism, but this one was trying to sell itself on that very premise. Also, I am not harsh on films for not being perfect adaptations of a book, but this is different, because it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the book at all aside from the wall in Israel and the title itself.
4/10 simply because some parts of it did look nice, and I'm even being in a giving mood with that.