Twelve Seconds Later

Rating: Null/10 (10 October 2013)

"To tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living things. Illusion has no value if it makes this harder for us. We recall the old saying: if you want to preserve peace, prepare for war. It would be in keeping with the times to alter this: if you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death." - Freud
Marc Forster's "World War Z" stars Brad Pitt as a UN specialist on the hunt for Patient Zero, the first human to have been infected with a deadly virus. This virus turns its victims into flesh eating zombies. Pitt hopes an autopsy of Patient Zero will lead to an antidote. The clock's ticking; the virus spreads fast.
Based on a novel by Max Brooks, "Z's" first half hour mostly consists of tense sequences in which Pitt runs from zombies. It's a strong opening – America is entirely overrun within hours – which climaxes with the West's few survivors sequestering themselves on a flotilla of warships.
The film's second act then sees Pitt bouncing from one country to the next, the poor guy desperate to find The Cause. When Pitt journeys to Korea and then the Middle East, you think Forster's flirting with racist clichés (Zombies as evil villains of the United Nations!), but these angles quickly evaporate. Pitt then touches down in Israel, which has erected a huge wall around its perimeter. Whilst the rest of the world has fallen to the zombie plague, Israel survives, hordes of barbaric zombies lapping against her defencive bulwarks. Again, this reeks of racist clichés, until Forster throws in scenes of Israeli Defence Force agents saving Palestinians, Arabs, Hardeim, secular Jews, Persians ("Each person we save is one less we have to fight!") and then being overrun and turned into zombies themselves. Even a little multi-ethnic solidarity can't hold back the zombie horde.
"Z's" second act climaxes with a tense sequence in which a commercial airline is infiltrated by zombies. Later Pitt and a Mossad agent trek to a World Health Organization building in Cardiff. Here they battle more zombies and eventually find a cure; the zombies aren't attracted to diseased humans and so humanity must "become sick" to avoid "zombie infection". In other words, mankind must infect itself in order to avoid infection.
Since George Romero's zombie franchise, it's been impossible to watch a zombie movie without being pre-emptively primed to search for a socio-political allegory. Romero's six zombie films, of course, mapped a broad movement away from 1960s political consciousness, to conformity, apathy and finally a proletariat zombie revolution against corporate/feudal lords. This revolution fails, and ends with humanity myopically sequestering itself in either digital bubbles ("Diary of the Dead") or reactionary, post-capitalist fantasies ("Survival of the Dead"). For Romero, zombies weren't necessarily "bad guys", so much as they represented a new social order which continuously replaced an outmoded old.
It's thus almost impossible to watch "World War Z" without ourselves searching for a Cause; what exactly do Forster's zombie's represent? The demands of a mass-market, global blockbuster, however, makes such a task strangely pointless. Calculated to appeal to everyone, and afraid of offending, "Z" reads like a checklist of typical (and often contradictory) zombie themes. In this regard, Forster's zombies seem to represent every phobia and affliction plaguing contemporary society: poverty, xenophobia, communication breakdowns, national, global and racial anxieties etc etc. Some of these angles stick better than others. For example, the film suggests that endemic third world poverty (North Korea, Africa, India, China etc) provides a breeding ground for pathogens. Elsewhere our hero is unemployed and job hunting, an attack in a plane reads like steerage attacking first class passengers, the film suggests that globalisation accelerates inequality, and scenes on-board military ships and air-planes suggest that the first world can no longer hide from the injustices forced upon everyone else; globalisation shrinks the globe.
But other scenes contradict these readings. It is prayers to God and boisterous Palestinians which lead to zombies overrunning Israel, ethnic minorities are some of the first to be mauled, and early scenes have a more broad, existential slant. "Mother Nature's a serial killer," one scientist say, "no one's better or more creative!" To confuse things further, you have Max Brooks likening zombies to AIDS ("The notion of a walking plague comes from growing up in the 1980s, when AIDS went from an obscure curiosity to a global pandemic. If that's not zombies, I don't know what is.") and far right critics reading the film as a tale about militant Islam. Meanwhile, regular Joe's read the film as a metaphor for HOW I WANT TO SHOOT PEOPLE AND NOT GET JAILED, whilst Freudian types view the entire zombie genre as mankind being infatuated with the spectacle of the apocalypse, audiences desiring the very deaths/purges they habitually disavow.
Regardless of how one interpret's "Z's" zombies, the film's "antidote" is a stroke of genius. "It's not a cure, just a way to hide," characters say, the film suggesting that for humanity to survive the zombie horde, man must "pretend to be a zombie", "share the enemy's weaknesses" and eventually "become one with them". What does this say about most human conflicts?
Aesthetically, Forster's film is all over the place. His CGI zombies feel plastic and don't convince, and the film's attempts at realism/authenticity are constantly undermined by Hollywood glitter. Elsewhere Forster's violence lacks gore and eschews close ups, and though his zombies are of the running variety (with 12 second incubation periods), they rarely seem threatening. Unlike Romero's films, Forster also naively keeps "man" and "nature" separated, never sympathises with his zombies and his protagonists are all righteous types. At its best, the film portrays a humanity desperate and under siege, afraid to touch land and so hiding on clouds and water. At its worst, the film recalls "I Am Legend", another plastic, post-apocalyptic film, tailored for those who hate the genre.
7.9/10 - Worth two viewings.