Movement is life. What?
Mother nature is a serial killer. Excuse me?
After the Holocaust, the Mossad learned that they should pay attention to vague worldwide memos about zombies and spend several months and billions of dollars building a 100-foot wall to protect Jerusalem. Come again?
Does any of this sound like it belongs in a film you’d want to watch? If it does, you’d better stop reading here.
World War Z is a great zombie book, and though it is remarkably easy to despise those who make vague accusations at ‘Hollywood’ for how completely ‘they’ can ruin a movie, the film adaptation of World War Z story serves as a guidebook on how to waste $200 million dollars and still turn a profit.
Brad Pitt has a family. And then there are zombies. Apparently, this amount of plot and character development are all that’s required in a film. Subtlety, relationships, rationales, and good dialogue have apparently gone the way of the dinosaur, replaced by a string of clipped scenes that wouldn’t make logical sense with narration describing the events and hordes of several thousand Zombies gesticulating toward the screen before you even know that Brad Pitt is the good guy. And when you figure out what the footage of the animals behind the credit sequence ripped off from The Terminator was supposed to mean, let the rest of us know.
You feel the strain of the four-plus writers who attempted to shape this story, each apparently taking shears to the work of their predecessors to remove all that useless dross like understanding characters and their motivations, or even taking the time to let a scene breathe enough to feel natural. Put simply, the entire film feels like a trailer for movie that might be better, but probably wouldn’t.
The rate at which characters appear and disappear is rivaled only by the scene in Hot Shots: Part Deux where the body count ticks off as Topper Harley wastes the meaningless peons, only World War Z isn’t funny. Logic isn’t generally a requirement of action films, but providing just a thread from which to suspend one’s disbelief is, and after hearing the rationale of the Israeli Mossad’s wall, their inability to defend it with guns or intelligence (like keeping screaming people away from it) and the impossible coincidence that it existed for months only to fail moments after Brad Pitt’s arrival, you’re just as likely to spend the rest of the film groping for that thread as a man fallen from a tightrope who fails to see the inevitability of his own demise.
As if it couldn’t get any worse, sci-fi hack extraordinaire Damon Lindelof is brought in to put his distinctive stamp on the problematic third act by introducing a ‘solution’ of no particular interest or dramatic relevance and ending the story loaded with the types of questions that would be posed by an annoying toddler; apparently he not only doesn’t care if the conclusion matters to the story arc, he also doesn’t care whether or not it makes sense.
At first, it seemed like Brad Pitt’s performance was being praised out of pity, since World War Z was very much his baby. Instead, he does a great job looking disturbed and terrified, allowing his eyes to emote the crushing grief of having $200 million dollars sucked out of his production company by a talentless gasbag like director Marc Forster, for whom the categorical guarantee of digesting a can’t-miss project into a steaming pile of cancerous refuse must seem like too good of a practical joke to pass up.
There are probably worse movies this year. Movie 43 is high on the list of candidates. Rest assured, however, that a few mildly entertaining action sequences shouldn’t be enough to invite the possibility of your head caving in as you try to reason why World War Z is worth watching, enjoying, and especially spending hard-earned dollars on in a recession.
(Disclaimer: This article was not written by Bryan Way because he was too angry to do it and couldn’t bring himself to be this mean.)
E-mail Bryan at ExaminerFilm@gmail.com for questions, advice, opinions, suggestions, and anger or outrage at this particular review. Follow Bryan on Twitter at ExaminerFilm and on Facebook at FilmExaminer where you’ll find proof that he isn’t this much of a jerk.
