A review for fellow zombie movie fanatics ...

Rating: 2/10 (3 September 2013)

World War Z is a highly flashy sometimes entertaining film if critiqued exclusively in the vein of the mega budget summer blockbuster, however, World War Z is also perhaps the lousiest zombie movie ever made.
Few fellow rabid fans of the flesh chewing genre 'Z' would argue against George Romero's 1968 'Night of the Living Dead' as the celebrated nascence of the zombie film. Forty-five years ago the dead stood up, up on the silver screen and took their first bite out of the living. Horror cinema has never been the same.
George Romero had an idea about how to scare us, and much to our benefit and that of future horror film making, chose to tell us his terrifying tale in visual form. The zombie movie genre was born. What Romero did not have was a bottomless bank account from which to draw financing for his vision.
With very limited funding, a small cast of talented actors, the cooperation of a local bureaucracy and a few dozen eager extras Romero crafted a horror movie, a zombie movie of intensity arguably yet to be bested in its situational creepiness.
His original script trapped five characters together in a remote farmhouse as increasing numbers of the recently reanimated human dead closed in on the property cutting off their means of escape. In spine chilling imagery as unforgettable as the first time we viewed it, Romero explicitly, graphically showed us what the returned dead were after; what those shambling rigor mortis bound fiends craved. His story telling skill left no doubt in the moviegoer's mind what was at stake for the heroes if the living corpses brought them down.
In the decades since Romero's original zombie vision nearly countless takes on zombie fiction in print and film have payed homage to his late 60's effort. We fans of the zombie movie have seen numerous shameless rip-offs of Romero's flesh hungry walking dead, and rarely, we have seen his original horror lore broadened or suitably developed with outstanding new imaginings of the ravenous risen dead. World War Z falls into neither classification as it is neither a new take on Romero's original concept, nor is it a blatant copycat.
The template upon which World War Z the movie is fleshed out around is of the variety identical to that used for any massive budget monster, robot, virus or natural disaster blockbuster. The script introduces a small group of main characters, takes a very brief glimpse at their normal lives, and then unleashes upon their beautified world a wave of death and destruction that worsens minute by minute. Substituted for the aforementioned engines of global catastrophe in this case is zombies.
Where Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead' shoved the viewer into a claustrophobic, dark, desperate situation populated by edgy characters driven by fear, animal survival and deep seated prejudice, and then frame by frame used the walls of their very refuge, their last refuge, as vise grips cranked constantly inward on them by plot pacing, World War Z, in the vein of the generic summer blockbuster engine which drives it, trades world view, death statistic counters and impossible action sequences for the tense squirm-in-your-seat situational gloom, chills and suspense around which the concept of the zombie film genre has most always been tightly wrapped.
Danger for, threat to the only protagonist classifiable as such (Brad Pitt's Gerry) in World War Z is only suspenseful before the film shows us who and what he really is. Pitt's Gerry Lane is a weakly imagined amalgamation of all five of the characters in Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Outside of a few brief and poorly written scenes that directly put his family in danger, he is the audience's sole connection to a story largely viewed from a global perspective almost as if the director had filmed the movie with an orbiting spy satellite.
The audience is never right there in the thick of dreadful terror with Gerry Lane, rather the viewer is thrown into the action and "the action" is the major flaw here. Gerry Lane is a composite of a mercenary, a surgeon, a virologist and some kind of globe hopping diplomat. Building on that skill set the film uses him as a tactical genius, a crack shot - in short as whatever kind of caricature is required to survive whatever situation the script next writes him into.
Unlike the many, many much better zombie movies that have come before it, World War Z gives us no sense of being trapped, stalked by the walking dead; no urgency of having to barricade ourselves into a fragile remote structure, no internal character conflict. In short, nothing much to indicate we are watching a zombie movie.
We zombie movie fanatics have all seen the micro budget zombie film effort that tries so desperately (and often fails) to convey as much terror or originality as its funding will allow. But even in failure, the absolute most rotten of those made for a penny attempts at zombie cinema rise far above what World War Z has failed to achieve with a budget thousands of times higher.
The Zombies. World War Z sells itself as a zombie movie. The reanimated dead have been visualized in many forms since Romero's 1968 masterpiece gave us pale, stumbling fiends whose real terror potential lied in small groups and the mind ripping fear you might recognize the one trying to eat you next as a friend or family member. In World War Z the zombies are superhuman sort of corpses who leap like cyborg frogs, make generic monster, monster movie sounds and use their heads for battering rams. Somehow these sprinting dead also swarm and climb like colonies of ants, and they do not eat the living.
World War Z is zombie treason and heresy on high of Romero's vision.