Forget the source material, this movie is very generic

Rating: 5/10 (7 February 2015)

A think that it's important to approach this movie with an open mind. Forget the source material and watch the film as its own experience, that way you can more accurately judge it. With that open mind you will see that World War Z is very generic and forgettable, a lazy attempt in a very crowded genre.
Much of the criticism surrounding this movie has revolved around how far it strays from the source material, that by doing so World War Z just becomes another zombie movie. I never agreed with the visceral reaction to straying from the source material, the book isn't high literature, it's not some unassailable classic, so it never upset me that they took great liberties with it. However, it really does seem unfathomable that they could make a less interesting movie than the one they did.
In my opinion this movie is caught between worlds; it doesn't know if it wants to be an action movie that takes you from set piece to set piece, or if it wants to be a more thoughtful addition to the genre. Instead, it never commits to either and thus never does anything particularly well. The development hell that this movie went through are well known, and you can see it play out on screen as there's no core to it. The best I can figure is that through countless re-writes (including the final, famous rewrite and re-shoot) elements from many different ideas got lumped together, but an internal logic was lost along the way.
Parts of the movie seem to want to play up a feeling of tension, other parts want to go full action movie, and yet others want to go for good old disaster porn. Is this movie 28 Days Later? Is it Aliens? Or is it The Day After Tomorrow? With such a clutter of competing ideas, no single one ever takes hold, and the audience is left drifting in the wind. The tension has no teeth, the action is boring, and the ramifications of a world ending zombie war aren't really explored in great detail.
One final point; for a movie that puts a lot of emphasis on action set pieces, you will be hard pressed to see find one that makes them less compelling. There's very little weight to the action because the zombies are just so over powering, one turns into 10 in mere seconds, entire cities are fully infested within a matter of minutes, and they're so fast and strong that humans can't compete. This may be compelling on paper, but all it means is that the action is like watching a ridiculous video game. And speaking of video games, who did the special effects for this movie, and how did they pass quality control? World War Z has absolutely terrible CG, it was awful in 2013 and only looks worse with each passing day. Even the makeup of the zombies looks laughable. The poor special effects really hammered home to me that this was not a labor of love, and instead was something closer to a burden on all those involved.
It's not a terrible movie, but there's better ones to see. Nothing is done well enough to make up for the things that it does poorly.