Some Good Things, Other Less So. Enjoyable Yarn

Rating: 6/10 (22 August 2013)

'World War Z' is a disaster movie; I didn't enjoy it very much, but partly because two bitches were chatting ceaselessly in the movie theater where I was. The plot of this movie is unrewarding—though compelling, involving, and I liked several parts—the Jerusalem episode, the flight with the Belarusian airplane, and the WHO building in Britain could have looked scary; the zombies have been given a new look, their behavior is not so much about eerie undead, as about a regression into _animality, a fall down the evolution scale—and fast, tetanus movements, and their assemblies had something entomological in nature, as if swarms of cadavers, of undead. Of course we are told nothing about the nature of the illness; but the quick death of the promising and sententious _virusologist was worth it. The plot itself felt improvised by a very young, and uninformed, person. But it's a disaster movie with beasts, and scenes and episodes are well made, and we travel from US to Korea, to Jerusalem, to Nova Scotia. Essentially a B movie script, with a handsome budget, I assume, but an unlikable cast and stupid lines. The action looks good, the movie looks clumsy and episodic, crumbled, disjointed. A good afternoon fun. Have you seen the Zekes storming Jerusalem's wall? Did you enjoy the ambiguity of Pitt's dream, or vision, on the Belarusian plane—the blonde and the hidden Zeke? And it's all a hurry, but it doesn't look hurried, they enjoy the movie—save for the actors, who seem rather uninspired, Pitt at least.
Scientists in cage, as in the British episode, had an unmistakable Lecter feel about it.
I guessed the water would harm the undead; but burning them proved efficient.
The cityscapes are interesting, and one remembers Pitt and his companions running up the stairs. I liked Pitt fighting zombies while he and his four companions are trying to leave the building and be rescued with a helicopter. So, there are good things. Some might find them enough. I would have been happier without the couple of annoying bitches already mentioned above.
The wife, played by Mireille Enos, is severely annoying. But Daniella Kertesz looks cool, and did a good role, as 'Segen', Gerry Lane's Israeli sidekick. As a matter of fact, perhaps the single likable character in the movie.
Enos, Mokoena, Gabel, Capaldi, Boeken, Favino were all competing for the most annoying and unlikable face on screen.
Favino has a nice girlfriend, Anna Farzetti.
Other than that, the script is crap—the young biologist lecturing about nature's murders, Jürgen about the tenth man, fortunately most of the time they avoid discussions.
A Mossad official, looking very Israeli, named Jürgen was a weird thing; anyway, the guy takes his time to tell you the rule of the tenth man.
After having built a wall, the Jerusalimitans fail to survey it, and the city is stormed by the Zekes. The solution defies belief by stupidity, after inoculating himself, Pitt runs to his team, and then to his family, and, not being the left box, if I remember well, there are no consequences whatsoever, so the solution is inoculating soldiers with WHO pathogens, which would kill anyone immediately, and the soldiers are supposed to fight being terminally ill, because what the zombies sense is not that one has been inoculated, but that one is gravely ill, so one has to be gravely ill, and with infectious diseases, caused by microorganisms isolated in WHO laboratories—and the writers assume that a man with a walking disability would be perceived by zombies as being terminally ill, hopelessly ill (and would still work as a military). So, in its stupidity, this solution, thought out by Pitt, is _defyingly absurd and unworkable, and no measures of prevention whatsoever are taken, no quarantine is instituted. It seems that no epidemics of typhus or meningitis or whatever they use begins.
It's true I have been studying epidemiology for six months, as a trained physician, and so I am likely to sense these goofs more keenly—but regardless, it was an abysmally stupid solution to come with.
And it's not as if they were obliged to come up with this absurdly imbecile solution.
It's a well shot and scored movie, a disaster movie intended as an epic, with good, though few, action scenes, but badly written, cast and played.