Decent film; chaos & human landscape

Rating: Null/10 (4 September 2013)

The good news is they salvaged this, because usually when you hear about reshoots the thing has more fundamental issues than a little repair can solve. They did it here, which is reason enough to celebrate because who needs a ruined film? It's tense, it's efficient in the right spots, if not a particularly great film. It adequately conveys the chaos and desperation, though we lose Romero's claustrophobia for disaster movie scope.
The bad news is you can see the stitches and damage left on the walls by all the repairing they had to do. I assume the ridiculous points were inherited from the book. But they added explanatory monologues that chaperone us from one place to the other, announcing the stakes and what needs to be done; none of it really necessary. Bad decision that reveals a studio pandering to its generic conception of some brainless audience.
It must have been a tough shoot anyway. They had to film panicked crowds in nearly every other scene, staging the panic. They had to touch it up probably frame by frame to enhance the spasmodic 'zombie' motion. And they had to weld that with digital footage of mayhem, presenting it as one world. I'm sure many a perfectionist would have bulked at the fundamentally chaotic idea.
Now if we're lucky, in such a film we have a somewhat revelatory chaos. Isn't this what separates Romero from Italian knockoffs of his films? a sense of common fabric with the world we know, a plausible extension.
We have it here. One thing is the first violence; the original sin. Contagion from last year humorously rendered this as some absurd, indifferent machination in nature which down the line destroys the world. Romero in Night had posited something from the stars, abstract, bigger. Here, the cause is resigned to be unknowable. It fits, if we are to have a mirror of life. The hottest news topic of the day is that the Congress approved US intervention in Syria; if we were to look for some original cause in that bloodshed, what would it be? Meaningless to even try. (you'll see that pundits will go as far back as it supports their storytelling agenda of how the world is put together, constructing destiny)
However, more interesting is to see how this unknowable first cause propagates through the world, ripping stuff.
Abstractly seen, from one of the many helo-shots, movement creates movement. Violence replicates itself through human fabric like surfs through water, the energy rippling through. There's so much flowing human landscaping here that you won't fail to notice this pattern. Of course, later on we find that it's some viral pathogen actively 'seeking' its biological continuation. We always have to fall back, and hold on, to some objective world.
But for a while this opens a portal in perception. In the Israel segment, our guy first notices that zombies will run past a boy who stays immobile, perceiving here the key to the problem. Here also the water metaphor is used, a riverflow around a rock. Unwittingly, the filmmakers illustrate a cool thing; stillness disarms violence; violence being motion attracted to and constantly creating itself. I recommend reading a bit on waves in general, maybe nature's greatest work of art.
Not the film's purpose, just an observation. But interesting of itself is that we have switched to fast zombies, and fast 'subjective' camera to capture the motions. It could be because this heightens plausibility and thus placement. It could be that we altogether have a faster perception of things than even 30 years ago, hugely so. Do we lose the stillness though? I mean broadly in the sense of a contemplative space.
Pitt is totally out of place here, he has that smirk in the eye that does not speak of the hardened man he plays.