"Movement is Life"

Rating: 7/10 (7 April 2020)

There could be worse mantras, especially for a zombie-apocalypse, action flick, than "movement is life," uttered by Brad Pitt's protagonist in an early scene expounding on the dictum for survival. Everything in "World War Z" is constant movement. The Zombies are fast. After the obligatory opening scene of domesticity lost in the house of Pitt, survivors are always on the run, always chased by the undead. Pitt and company continually move from one city to the next, from automobile to automobile, helicopter to helicopter, plane to plane, one explosion, gun fight and action set piece after another, in the investigation of the pathogen. To look back isn't to see the stillness amidst the carnage. Shots hardly have time to even frame the usual zombie gore, which, besides having the benefit of a more marketable PG-13 rating, keeps the focus on the mass movement, panic and rate of infection. A striking picture amid a pandemic. Moreover, movement is the foundation of movies. It's in the name, and motion pictures themselves work as an analogy to the undead, or its antidote, as reanimated photographs, once still and dead, projected back to life, living pictures on the screen. Movement is life.
Oh, I doubt the filmmakers had any intention of making such a self-reflexive connection, to philosophize cinema, and the movie certainly doesn't follow through on such a thesis; I'm merely saying that it's apt, this relentless momentum. The closest the movie comes is with the surveillance cameras at the World Heath Organization facility. There's the seemingly contradictory dichotomy here, too, of the capturing of still images as a metaphorical death and their reanimated movement as returning life. The same contradiction exists within the film in the ultimate confrontation, the vaccine, against the zombies--that to defeat the undead, one must become terminally ill, too. Just as to create motion pictures, still, lifeless ones must be made.