World War Z- A review that hurts

Rating: 6/10 (26 August 2013)

To begin with, this review is mostly going to be about zombies. If you're not interested in that, then I can go ahead and tell you that Marc Foster's WWZ is a mediocre zombie movie with Brad Pitt in the star role. The majority of the plot is either extremely predictable or just plan confusing, e.g. the plane ride, which felt added in with no real explanation. Furthermore the ending is irrelevant to the entire beginning plot line, and I'm pretty sure the film in general is anti- Semitic. WWZ is simply a showcase of how hundreds of CGI zombies can look on screen, and how Brad Pitt looks unkempt. But don't despair my dear three readers, as I've already beaten Dead Rising and seen Kalifornia, so this loser that wasn't tricked.
I suppose what angers me so bad about WWZ was the missed potential. The film was supposed to be based off of Max Brook's epic book by the same name, which is completely true if you scrap the entire storyline, characters, and style of the zombies. I know all you Honey Bo Bo fans might complain that I'm just trying to be an intellectual who's only critical because I have a library card, but this isn't the usual case of 'the book is better'. This is a case of studio execs and producers altering the entire film to fit an audience that they think are too vapid to handle solid creativity, which if you look at the cancellation of great shows in the last ten years (Deadwood, Firefly, Arrested Development), may make them correct. But for all you non-readers, who for some reason are reading this, let me explain why they screwed the pooch via bullet points.
The book starts off after the zombie war, and is told in flashbacks. This is extremely effective as each chapter is about three pages long, and deals with a different person's story of survival, based primarily off the country or society they live. In the book, the main character is a UN census worker who's sent to these different areas of the world to get the total amount of people that have survived. The prologue of the book deals with his boss telling him all he wants is the numbers, and not the incredible stories that he was told by the survivors. Thus the book was created. In the movie, the main character is a retired CIA agent or something.
In the movie, the main character's goal is to find patient zero so America can discover an antidote. In the book, patient zero is explained in full detail in the very first chapter of the book. And he's taken to a hospital for research, and they know where he got bitten.In the book there is no wife and family of the main character, as his identity is inconsequential. In this way, he is everyman, much like the interviewer in Interview of the Vampire. In the movie, wife and kids. In the book, the zombies are slow moving, George Romero style, and their bodies are slowly decaying due to a virus called Solanum. In the movie, they run and jump around like Toad from X-men after smoking trailer full of meth. In the book, the real terror isn't as much the zombies, but the fear that comes from a never ending foe, one that shows no signs of remorse or understanding. This in turn creates a claustrophobic reaction, and there's an entire (awesome) chapter which explains how battling them with helicopters and modern weaponry are useless. In the movie, they seem to have some recognition of their previous lives, and they are fought with helicopters and modern weaponry.
Furthermore there's no battle of Yonkers, no bad-ass blind Tibetan Monk, and no Paris Hilton getting killed with her dog. Almost none of the original stories were mentioned, except for the Israeli defenses, but that plot line veers 100% away once the zombies realize they can climb on top of each other. Also the North Koreans rip out their own teeth, which is stupid and is nowhere near as cool as what they do in the book. Finally, the main character has long hair. Long Hair!!! Any Max Brooks fan knows that this is ridiculous and massively stupid in a zombie attack.
Despite my loyalty to the book, WWZ isn't even a good zombie movie. It was more like a combination of Independence Day and Outbreak, though both of those movies were better by any standard. Even Independence Day's horrible ending of 'let's put a virus in the alien's computer system' made more sense than the resolution of WWZ. Quite simply, it was a crappy action movie, not a zombie movie.
In the end, WWZ is a Brad Pitt vehicle instead of a solid adaptation of a great zombie book. It's predictable, rips off half the action films since Die Hard, and has major plot lines introduced/resolved in less time than it takes to cook an egg mcmuffin. Add in an ending which is sillier than Sign's 'they're allergic to water' ploy, and this makes a film that is more confused than my grandfather using excel. As much as it pains me to advise it, skip WWZ and go rent Shaun of the Dead instead.