Waste of budget

Rating: 6/10 (4 July 2013)

I didn't read the book, that said first. So I will not complain about the story differing significantly from the original.
I was only looking forward to see a real big budget zombie movie. Zombies on a global scale, big pictures, big war. A very mild zombie picture though, with PG-13. And I was hoping to get a sort of realistic approach to the matter: Infection spreading, society crumbling, fighting back, and themes like that.
WWZ starts in the middle of it. The big cities all over the world are in the state of getting overrun. The whole movie focuses on one man trying to find out where the "infection" came from. And he wants to get back to his family. The only other significant character is a female Israeli soldier who manages to escapes together with him from dying Israel.
Even with this pretty narrow viewpoint WWZ might have become a nice movie.
But the zombies are way to fast. If you are confronted with 2 or 3 of them there is virtually no escape. These monsters are even faster then they were in "28 days later". Once bitten a victim turns into a zombie within seconds. How should a disease that infectious spread around the world? Every single infected person/zombie would be detected long before reaching any overseas destination. Just take a look at "28 days later", exactly for this reason the infection is confined to Great Britain.
Well, I probably should not complain that much about the logic in a zombie picture.
PG-13 and super fast zombies however destroy all horror. The zombies are most of the time just a fast flowing mass. And these flows are animated pretty poor. What did they spend the budget on? In the last third of the movie things get more claustrophobic. When our hero tries to get some biological samples in a lab complex full of zombies. There are numerous examples for this in other films and mostly done better.
WWZ has some really mass scenes, but the poor animation spoils them. They just do not shock you because they look too phony. And because there is not one person that you really care about. It is by far not bloody enough for the genre. The characters are somewhat remote. One simply does not care that much when someone gets slaughtered. (A lot different from 28 days)
The finale is pretty disappointing. The movie ends exactly where the war would/should start.
The film is entertaining, but no real zombie horror movie. Rather watch the Romero films or the walking dead. Even resident evil is more interesting.