Critical Review of World War Z

Rating: 3/10 (23 June 2013)

If you remove the CGI-generated biblical-themed eye candy of zombies climbing up the West Bank wall and you focus on the character development, you are left with a B grade horror movie. Maybe that was the plan, I mean the last character development we ever saw in Brad Pitt was in Twelve Monkeys in 1995 and then it all went downhill because as long as Brad is bigger than the film around him, Brad is not going to be taken to be a serious actor. It's a doggone shame because he is a great actor whose personality keeps getting in the way of his role. If I compare this with the original 1920 zombie theme film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, with all its expressionist amateurism, Caligari wins hands down on the basis of character development. Did you know that there are approximately 800 zombie films? Brad's in Israel, playing a seasoned UN military specialist who, with no medical knowledge, becomes Earth's last hope to cure the zombie virus. Zombies won't maul a sick human because 10 million years of mammalian distaste for eating soon-to-be-carrion can't be undone by even a zombie virus. Brad goes looking for a lab that holds deadly diseases to create a camouflage vaccination for earth's surviving humans. Let's have a critical look at the science and geography of "Z": 1. If the zombies are undead, what do they care if they get Hepatitis B or Ebola virus? How are zombies able to sense that a human is unwell? Must be through smell. So I guess zombie virus enhances smell, something that film maker and author of Zombie Survival Guide Max Brooks (the son of Mel Brooks) could flesh out a bit more for the sequel (or prequel or whatever). 2. Brad goes to Jerusalem to a virology storage facility to find frozen viruses. We know the trip to Israel wasn't about meeting Bio-Strategist Dr Warmbrunn because Brad could have called him on the sat-phone he had on the plane, the one on which he managed to call his wife. But  isn't Israel's Sheba Medical Center located in Ramat Gan in Tel Aviv, 70km W of Jerusalem? I mean, you'd think Dr Warmbrunn would have met Brad at The Sheba Center for Regenerative Medicine, considering this is a zombie movie? 3. Jerusalem is a last stronghold of civilization. One of the walls seems to be the West Bank barrier wall. It doesn't come near the city wall, does it? 4. The zombies start climbing on top of each other until there is literally a stepladder of zombies. The soldiers start shooting zombies and the zombie tower starts crumbling down. As explained in the film, the only place to shoot-kill them is in the head. Even if one in 20 zombies took a head shot and fell off the zombie tower, wouldn't that just lighten the load of zombies and make it easier for underpinning zombies so more zombies could climb up? Why did the tower of zombies collapse? 5. By the time Brad Pitt gets to Jerusalem, the zone is established, probably for days. Brad Pitt arrives and every zombie within 10km of Jerusalem starts running at the wall. He must be zombie messiah! 6. When the zombies invade the compound, Brad is escorted to Ashdod military airport  hang on a second  they just left the old city and there's an airport right outside. Ashdod is 70km east of Jerusalem and it's a naval base, not an airbase. The airport in the film, with its sprawling green fields, looks like Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, about 45 NNE of Ashdod. 7. As they take off, heading for Nova Scotia, which is of course NW of Ashdod, Brad looks out the plane window and sees the Dome of the Rock. So that confirms that they ran straight out of the old city and into Ashdod. BY the way, there isn't an airport near Jerusalem that can service 747 Boeings. 8. Brad is on the Air Belarus flight over Wales and a zombie starts biting people. Now the world's fastest-acting infection is probably the common cold. It takes a couple of hours to incubate. From the time the zombie bit a passenger until the whole of economy class was a swath of zombies, was about one minute. If homo sapien turned into a zombie inside of one minute, the body would probably die from shock or explode (hey my opinion is just as valid as Brad Pitt's character's right?) Now the zombies can't be undead. They are infected from a virus and need to eat people, so they are very much alive. 9. Then Brad throws a hand grenade into the rear of the plane to amputate the rear of the plane (he amputated the soldier's hand in the previous scene) and the plane manages to stay airborne. The pilots crash land in desolate woods (they were heading for Cardiff). With a piece of metal through his side, Brad gets to the Cardiff Institute of Infection and Immunology in Heath, the middle of urban Cardiff. Except it's in the woods, 5km from where Brad's plane crash landed in the mountains. 10. What zombie movie would be complete without a hospital scene? Brad manages to take down several zombies with a crow bar. When he finds himself trapped in a glass room facing a zombie, he chooses to infect himself with a deadly live virus to camouflage himself rather than open the door and crowbar the zombie. Two minutes later, safe, brad is being injected with a vaccine against the disease with which he injected himself which disease? Brad brought back a box of 50 vials. Did he actually remember which one? And once you have the infection, can you be vaccinated? The best part about this movie was when the lights went on and there were a hundred people sitting around me. Got all creeped out and so did everyone else!