This is not a movie, it is a special demo with no plot

Rating: 1/10 (23 June 2013)

The special effects were impressive, I will give you that. However, the rest wasn't. The 2 hour experience felt like watching titanic sink, in real time. Here is a list of the things that went wrong:
1. PG13 rating: The director and producers wanted to make this movie family friendly, so they took away all the gore, death and decay that makes the zombie genre what it is. This made the zombies totally not scary and even on occasions towards the end, just plain laughable.
2. Senseless plot: The UN sends a small team to investigate the beginning of the outbreak. They have a neurologist on the team, who incidentally cant stop using cheesy metaphors about mother nature. Why can't they send multiple teams, with more than one expert on each? After all it is clearly a high risk mission, casualties must be expected. After the neurologist dies right after his pretentious speech, it is clear that the whole thing was an excuse to put Brad Pitt in a dangerous situation so that we will feel tension. We still didn't because, see 3.
3. Bad character development: None of the characters in the movie had any depth. As a result we didn't care if they lived or died. Pitt's family was just the detestable suburban family, who apparently does nothing but turn money into feces. Their marriage and children felt so plastic and ready-made that I personally would not have felt a thing if Pitt was torn apart by zombies in front of his family. Well, actually that might have improved this movie, alas it couldn't have happened because of 1.
4. The ending sequence: Just as we think that the plot cannot get worse and we make peace with the idea of enjoying the special effects, the movie takes another down turn in the last 40 minutes or so. The special effects disappear and we find Pitt and his sidekick in a W.H.O. research facility playing hide and seek with zombies. There is no suspense because the ending is announced basically in the first 5 minutes of this sequence, Pitt will go into the zombie infested part of the building, get some disease samples and bring them back. They will use one of the samples to infect themselves and see if zombies will lose their appetite. They do, and we win, with another pretentious speech about how it is not the end but just the beginning. Yawn.
5. Plot holes:
a) Zombies can diagnose a terminal illness just by looking at someone and for some reason, they avoid that person. This doesn't make any sense at any level. First, even a doctor with years of medical training can't do that without extensive testing. How can a mindless zombie, who cant figure out how to unbuckle her seat belt, do it just after a glance by the corner of her eye? Second, why the hell would zombies avoid a sick person? There is no reason. After all, the virus, or whatever that is causing the outbreak is not harmed by any other disease. The W.H.O. scientists said so themselves.
b) The W.H.O. facility is in Wales, Britain. Among the weapons they have in their arsenal is a baseball bat. Does the director even know where Wales is? Does anyone, one soul in Wales, own a baseball bat? Was that so difficult to make it a cricket bat? Come on now, I think that the director is a bit of a thickie but I can't believe that no one who looked at this movie pre-release had seen Shaun of the Dead. And to add insult to injury, the soldier girl with one hand picks the baseball bat. This scene alone is enough to prove that the director of the movie is blind from birth, because anyone who had at least one functioning eye at any point in his life and used it to glance at a baseball bat would have immediately realized that it is a two-handed weapon. How could a special forces soldier could not recognize it as such and not pick the crowbar?
c) The cellphone battery: In one scene, the cellphone's battery is declared dead. In a later scene, it is working again. Really?
d) When they decide to recover the disease samples, they give Pitt no briefing about which containers contain what. But apparently, at least one container is full of deadly stuff, which would kill him immediately. Why? Why? OMG, why? The security cameras show the room clearly. All they need to do is to seat Pitt and the soldier girl in front of one of the displays and show them where the goodies are before sending them in.
e) Pitt has no special combat, first aid or survival training. He apparently learned all that stuff on the field, and he is not a scientist either. Finally, he doesn't have experience as a commanding officer. So, why would he, instead of literally thousands of military people who were purpose-trained for such a mission, is chosen to lead the mission? It doesn't make any sense. It would have made a lot of sense if his UN friend said something like "Look, I convinced these people that you are the best man to lead this mission though we both know that you aren't. You are just a guy who spent ten years handing out blankets to African countries. But I had to do it to save your family, alright? They would have never let you on the ship otherwise and you would have died in Philly." That would have not only sealed this plot hole, but also would have given Pitt's character a tragic and desperate quality, which would have helped us care about him. But the mindless zombies who made this movie missed this chance too.