Nothing to Do With the Book, Except for the Zombies

Rating: 7/10 (20 June 2013)

The trailer for this film was very exciting. It did not show anything really about what the film was about, except for some big unknown event that was turning the city into sudden chaos one morning.
I found out that there was a book that inspired this film, so I sought it out to read it. I was surprised to discover that this book, and I guess likewise the film, is about ZOMBIES! The trailers (wisely, I thought) did NOT show zombies at all. The book by Max Brooks was a compilation of short man vs. zombie stories which were happening all over the world.
More than 50% into the book, I did not read any scene that remotely resembled the scenes shown in the trailer. I was ready at that point to concede that this Brad Pitt film will have nothing to do with the book except for the main fighting a worldwide zombie infestation premise. And I turned out to be right.
"World War Z", the film, is about Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a UN special operations agent, who had retired from that job to be with his family. (This character Gerry Lane was NOT even in the book.) We follow Gerry's adventures as it starts in his home town of Philadelphia, PA, as we saw in the trailer, when he gets his family to safety, and was then assigned to play a vital role in the zombie fight.
The rest of the film brings Gerry to Korea, Israel, and Wales as he was able to observe and hypothesize a possible weakness in these zombies. The latter third of the film happens in a WHO facility where he was able to actually conduct the experiment he needed to prove his theory. Can Gerry discover the key to turn the tide of the war to the human's favor or will the zombies continue to spread their plague?
The zombie scenes were NOT unnecessarily gory. There were NO scenes of exploding heads or trailing guts or gushing body fluids which are commonly seen in other zombie movies, even as these were very graphically described in the book. While horror purists would call this lame, the way it was done in this film was not any less exciting, yet makes this movie more accessible to more people. This could have been a spectacular gore fest, but obviously the filmmakers had a different vision in mind.
The scenes of the mass zombie attacks were very well-executed by the computer-generated visual effects. The Jerusalem scenes were especially disturbing and heart-racing. The scenes on the Belarus Airlines jet plane were also exciting as they were unbelievable.
They try their best to give credible scientific approach to the problem, and I would give them props for that. This is even if the plan was on the simplistic side, and shaky in the medical sense. Opportunistic infections, anyone? However, they did prepare us for that solution by the statement a character makes at the beginning of the mission.
Brad Pitt did well as the lead actor. He was practically the only known name in the cast, and he dominates the screen with this star presence. Yet, we can still empathize with his character Gerry and the difficult situations he got into, no matter how incredibly lucky or superhuman he may have become. He had a "sort-of" commercial for a particular soft- drink brand towards the end, which was amusing, yet still well- integrated in the action of the scene.
Even if the film had almost nothing to do with the book, I found this movie quite absorbing and intense, and ultimately entertaining and satisfying. Maybe they should have just changed the title.