Hollywood Apocalypse.

Rating: 7/10 (7 August 2013)

Some films, rather than standout as cohesive, engaging, entertaining works that operate on a consistent, level base, in fact go down a different, more risk taking approach in the hope it will work out. Often due to an assortment of production difficulties, the initially envisioned motion picture turns out to be a completely different final film. Famous examples include Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (1979), Sam Peckinpah's "Major Dundee" (1965) and infamously, Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" (1981), that succeed in putting its studio, United Artists, into bankruptcy. However, conflict doesn't always produce a great film, or even a flawed great movie. Sometimes it just sits on the screen as a catalogue of disaster. If "World War Z" isn't entirely bad, then perhaps it is a testament to director Marc Forester's ability to marshal his footage and admit that his present ending was no good and proceeded to film a new climax.
Throughout the epic-scale film, elements of a smaller, more personal film are ever present: the sight of a cop, facing the breakdown of civilisation, helping himself to food supplies like everyone else; a drunk on the streets of Philadelphia calmly oblivious to the confusion and violence around him. The surreal sight of soldiers in South Korea, in pitch black, driving rain, cycling on small bicycles to avoid attracting the plague-ridden zombies. The implicit point that countries that are prepared for war, like North Korea and Israel, are better organized for cataclysmic disaster. The deathly, eerily unnatural silence of a Welsh village; these details give weight to Forester's direction, as does the impressively mounted small-scale action scenes such as the initial zombie attack in gridlocked Philadelphia traffic. These scenes are the best in the film and help to displace (but not vanquish) the film's many manifest flaws.
Brad Pitt has a commendably intense performance and is backed up by a host of small roles from actors such as David Morse, James Badge Dale and Daniella Kertesz who are all very good, yet their effect is diluted by the unfortunately linear, globe-trotting script that suffers from repetition despite a few ingeniously cruel twists of fate. The constant cutbacks to Pitt's family throughout the course of the film help anchor his character, but they're too short to establish their characters as anything but ciphers, a problem for everybody except Pitt.
The ending, while fine in isolation, hardly creates a sense of conclusion while the tacked-on coda contains enough hastily sketched information to furnish two more films, leaving the last ten minutes rushed.
The lacklustre computer generated imagery for the Jerusalem sequence is only one of the film's problems in a movie that finally, struggles under them, some due to poor scripting and others because of a lack of literal direction. It's hard to be convinced by it and that may well be its greatest failing.