Pass the Popcorn review

Rating: 5/10 (22 June 2013)

World War Z is a PG-13 movie adaptation of the 2006 Max Brooks novel of the same name. However, if my Google research is correct, the movie has very little to do with the book. And if history taught us anything is that movie adaptations are often not as good as the books they are trying to adapt - especially if they greatly differ from their source material. I, for one, didn't read the book and am not able to judge whether World War Z was or wasn't a successful adaptation. But I can judge World War Z as a stand alone movie and I must say - it's not particularly good.
The movie is mostly about Brad Pitt's character - a former U.N. employee named Gerry Lane - trying to find a cure for the zombie outbreak. There isn't much plot to World War Z and the story hasn't got any important establishing points. That is one of the problems with World War Z - there is no real plot development. World War Z "compensates" for the lack of a coherent story with being a fast paced/action packed movie. The movie's action sequences literally start within the first several minutes and almost never stop during this 2 hour long ADD fest. To be honest, there is some mild social commentary to be found somewhere in the story, but nothing significantly distinguishable from the usual clichés.
Besides the weak plot, World War Z, unfortunately, has a problem with how it portrays zombies. It was obvious that World War Z wanted to break the world record for the movie with the largest number of zombies. Of course, the creators of this movie couldn't possibly achieve this goal by using only actors with make-up so they created the huge zombie masses by using CGI. As a result of that, the zombies in World War Z look very artificial. Sometimes I even felt like I was watching something from a live action video game (not unlike Left 4 Dead), which definitely isn't a good thing. In conclusion, I mostly enjoyed the movie during the third act, when the actual actors in make-up replace the inane computer-generated caricatures.
Furthermore, World War Z doesn't really invest in its characters, save from Brad Pitt's character: they are all bland, one dimensional and boring - and when uninteresting characters die/fight for their lives there isn't much drama to it. Still, if you're not really that interested in drama/characters/overall story and just want to watch action scenes and eat popcorn - World War Z is the movie for you, since there are some really impressive and tense action scenes. As for the rest of you, I certainly wouldn't recommend World War Z because of how disappointing the movie feels - it's just a weak shadow of something that could have been great.
Rating: 5/10 Read more at http://passpopcorn.wordpress.com/