No CPR needed. This film was undead on arrival

Rating: 2/10 (10 October 2013)

Now I admit I've read the book so just from that you can probably get an idea of where I'm going with this. But I'd read enough reports beforehand to realise that aside from the name of the film and the soldiers calling zombies 'Zeke', everything else from Max Brook's work was pretty much discarded.
That's frustrating to know given the source material, but as a fan of zombie movies in general I thought I'd at least give it a shot. That shot means there's two hours of my life I won't get back.
It's badly paced, the zombies are more like the a poor version of the 'infected' from films like '28 Days Later' or 'I Am Legend' and rather than be an interesting story, it's comes across as an excuse to show off Brad Pitt's acting chops.
Now I know Brad gets grief for his celebrity lifestyle and some really really terrible perfume ads, but generally I quite like him as an actor. This had the potential to be an ensemble story told from numerous perspectives. Failing that making the lead have any kind of personality may have helped. Instead it's Pitt going into a terrifying zombie encounter followed by a talky bit. Rinse and repeat.
The fact these kinds of films (and I would very much throw it into the group of 'The Day After Tomorrow' and '2012') make money is quite tragic for the industry. They'll continue to make these films and people will continue to waste time watching them. CGI floppy zombies flying across the screen are not scary. You feel no empathy for any character, there's no real grandness to the scale of the zombie apocalypse, the score is filled with loud 'bangs' for the sake of making you jump but builds no atmosphere and no emotion. The score wouldn't have sounded out of place from a Van Damme film rather than a film budgeted at a reported $190m.
To watch this as harmless entertainment it's frustrating, to watch it with any thought of World War Z the book or even audio book, is downright painful. I just can't figure out for the life of me what they spent the money on. It certainly wasn't the script.