A mindless action movie that shits on zombie lore and, more so, the source material.

Rating: 3/10 (8 September 2013)

Throughout the whole movie I kept thinking: these have to be the same guys who ruined I Am Legend. Nope, it's just something everyone in Hollywood does well. Could a World War Z movie even work? It's hard to say. It's easy to see that World War Z can not work as a nonstop action movie, it is meant to be A History of The Zombie War, a retelling after the fact. Mass-produced for the American market results in zombie action schlock. A passable movie in this case requires more thought and imagination than most writing teams are used to. Luckily, there's an entire book that's *basically* a screenplay in itself just waiting to be ignored in favor of mainstream garbage.
At the most basic level, I don't understand why they bought the rights to the book, it would clearly have worked as a mockumentary with separate vignettes featuring big stars in small roles. They obviously just wanted a potential franchise with Brad Pitt, and shoehorned elements of some random book his company had purchased into a Bourne-style action flick.
There are glaring problems in the story and completely illogical steps taken by the main character, the supposed "best investigator in America," who is a complete moron and half the characters he meets may as well be card-board cutouts with post-it notes stuck to them reading "go this way". What was the deal with the random establishing of Matthew Fox's character, only to have absolutely nothing done with him because they swapped out the ending for some random crap about zombies being scared of sick people. Why is almost every zombie CG? I get it for scenes where there's hundreds of them swarming around like ants but a lot of the time they even used CG zombies in isolation. Is it really cheaper and easier to animate a CG zombie than it is to use an extra with some zombie makeup?
The characters are completely thin, stock cutouts. There is not a single interesting character and they have no development or depth at all. A boring, barely existent plot which feels thrown together. There's also a complete lack of tension because it just isn't made well. Examples:
*Fast zombies - A symptom of lazy writing.
*Zombies scaling the black gates of Mordor - Silly.
*Hey everyone but the protagonist died in the plane crash, how convenient!
*This Israeli girl's character has served her purpose, she'll either die or split up with the journalist. - No, the focus groups like her too much. Just have her tag along with the journalist or something I don't know, no I don't care that it doesn't make sense and that we never bothered giving her a personality. Focus groups ruin everything again!
There aren't any scenes with enough time or atmosphere to leave an impression. It's disaster porn. It's 2012 with Brad Pitt.
And it sucks.