Which Ones Were the Zombies?

Rating: 4/10 (30 June 2013)

Gerry Lane (that's pronounced Jerry, played by Brad Pitt) is a former UN worker of some sort who finds himself and his family right in the middle of the zombie apocalypse while living in Philadelphia. After being saved by another UN worker who just so happens to be a Deputy Secretary General, Lane and family are put on a UN ship that has also collected far too many other refugees, and Lane is presented with a mission: re- enlist and find out the cause of the virus, or your family is going to be placed in the significantly more dangerous refugee safe zones. Brad chooses the former, and off we go.
It has the feel of a really good zombie blockbuster. It has the star, the known and respected director, and the source material. I kept thinking, "can they go wrong?" Yes, they can. For one, they can deviate almost completely from the source material. Max Brooks's eponymous novel traced a surprisingly realistic account of what would happen should a violent global virus erupt and become a worldwide predicament. But the novel never mentioned the name of the mysterious UN negotiator conducting his investigation. It never introduced a character named "Gerry Lane", let alone his family. It never introduced the question; "why did Gerry leave the UN in the first place?" only for it to never be answered. It was much, much better that way.
The problems with the film are in the script. The cast does a hit-and- miss job playing their roles but never seem to understand their lines better than the audience does. Just as Lane looks for the stem of the virus, the stem of scripted uncertainty is not in the world of World War Z but in the world of the four people who wrote it. Having more than one or two authors usually means that after the first draft, the script was circulated around and around until only faint hints of the source material are still recognizable when the movie starts filming. Lane flies all over the world, and the audience flies with him, only to find him no longer investigating but solving, shooting, and exploding.
As Lane, Brad Pitt plays the role he usually plays of an only slightly less confident Brad Pitt. I kept thinking that the ending would bring about a shocking twist; he was already a zombie! Pitt shuffles through this script with all the interest of watching paint dry, and once an hour passes his ploddy performance grows weary. However forgettable his performance, I always see some of the audience uninterested in plot and only in Tyler Durden's face, so if that's why you buy your ticket, no shame. Just don't think you'll really remember who the main character is or what his mission is. As for his wife, Mirielle Enos turns in equally uninspired work as the only woman in the known world who doesn't seem to be able to create any romantic chemistry with People's Sexiest Man Alive.
Following the conclusion of ABC's "Lost", lead star Matthew Fox could have taken any role he wanted. By now he could even have taken Pitt's role at the helm of this film. But Fox decided to take a break for a few years, and now he is reduced to playing some guy who works on a UN helicopter. He might have even had a line. David Morse, the only other American actor I recognized, plays a toothless CIA spook imprisoned in a US military base in South Korea. Morse's performance was undoubtedly the film's best. Hearing the little whistle as he spoke through his gums was chilling as you read about Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and the like. His too-brief role emphasizes the possibilities that present themselves when you turncoat the United States. Morse alone deserves a star for his work.
Effects-wise, the infected weren't anything special, but how would I know that? What does a zombie truly look like? We never found out if the infection led to death of the host and reanimation. It didn't appear that anything external was actively rotting. Some of the undead appear a bit comical, and their gangly movements were just different enough to inspire scattered laughter in the theater.
Some of the best scenes of the film involved Lane traveling to Israel and Wales, the only two countries he actually manages to visit. In Jerusalem, Lane discovers that Israel has built a wall to keep the zombies out. We never get an answer to the facts behind the wall; how big is it? Is it just around Jerusalem, or the entire country of Israel? Regardless, a band of street musicians somehow manage to provoke enough ire for thousands of the undead to scale the wall and attack the city. That band must have been terrible.
As a zombie is appetized by the possibility of prey, the audience is intrigued by the possibility of entertainment. The undead eat the zombie for sustenance, but quickly want to move on for more. As part of the ravenous audience, I felt the same way.