[Note: This review includes some spoilers.]
If you thought a movie like “World War Z,” released June 21 in the United States, was a touch out of character for an actor like Brad Pitt, whose movie resume runs the gamut from “Moneyball” to “Fight Club” and “Inglourious Basterds,” you wouldn’t be in the minority.
Pitt has been right at home playing the roles of many idiosyncratic, nuanced characters — perhaps none better than Tyler Durden and Mickey O’Neil — but a former United Nations investigator turned apocalyptic zombie killer, not so much. Nonetheless, leaving no genre-stone unturned, Pitt, with his legions of writers and production prowess, has given us a different sort of zombie thriller, one in which the undead move just as fast — or even faster — than we who are among the living, are inexplicably angered by loud noises and as bizarre as this may seem, demure when confronted with terminally ill patients.
The film opens as many thrillers: In the soft confines of a domicile surrounded by a wife and kids. The protagonist — and really the only character with any semblance of depth, and that’s being generous — is Gerry Lane, a retired U.N. official who wants nothing more than to continue the quiet life as a homemaker in Philadelphia. Within minutes, disaster strikes and the family witnesses a series of unexplained explosions up ahead on the highway. Philadelphia, and most other major cities in the United States and the world, has been overrun with zombies, which military personnel refer to as “zekes.” Avoiding certain death several times over, Lane and his family manage to escape aboard a military helicopter and seek shelter at a Naval base 200 miles off the coast of New York. After nudging from one of his former U.N. co-workers and the confusingly named Thierry Umutoni, Lane agrees to go on a global chase to find the root of the zombie problem, which officials deduce is some sort of malignant strain of a virus.
After a brief and terrifying trip to South Korea that proves to be a largely fruitless endeavor, Lane flies to Jerusalem, which we learn, received some preemptive knowledge about the zombie outbreak and quickly finished a wall to fortify the city. While in Jerusalem, Lane finds out that city officials learned about the zombies from an Indian communique. The man Lane meets there uses some strained logic to explain why Jerusalem made such a huge decision to build a wall based only on rumors about a zombie attack. In Jerusalem, Lane comes no closer to finding out the source of the infection.
Here is where some of the most stunning visuals in the movie take place, and even more so if you purchased the 3D movie. Responding to the music, singing and other commotion inside the city, zombies along the perimeter of the wall, which looked to be about 500-1,000 yards tall (just a ballpark), begin scaling the structure in mass and progressively climbing on top of each other to try to get over the wall (See cover photo). They eventually clamor over the wall and begin attacking the people inside the city. During this sequence, with thousands of zombies cluttering the streets, one gets the sense that Lane, along with a young woman soldier he saves, should have been dead several times over. It is here also that Lane notices an oddity: The zombies run right past someone who is terminally ill, a nugget of truth which eventually figures into the climax. During one escape attempt, personnel in a helicopter attempt to lower the plane to allow Lane and the woman to enter, only to have the helicopter be overrun with zombies and go down in flames. They eventually make it a landing strip and board a Belarus-based airliner.
I won’t reveal too much of the ending, but suffice it to say that all is not well aboard the plane, and like all other zombie movies to date, viewers were no closer to learning about the mysteries behind the undead in the beginning of the film than they were at the end.
I still don’t know what the fascination is with zombie movies, but I will give Pitt and the crew credit for this offering: At least they endowed the zombies with some qualities that are somewhat unique to the genre, although “World War Z” is not the first introduction to zombies who can actually run (See “Flight of the Living Dead“) instead of shuffling along and dragging their feet. Although their aversion to sound, which was never explained either, took away from the enjoyment of seeing the main characters mow down the undead by the hundreds, this trait did provide the possibility for some chilling fight scenes in which Lane had to, more quietly, engage the monsters in hand-to-hand combat.
As for the plot and character development, let’s face it: Until that frightening day when science can actually enduce a real-life form of zombiosis, movie makers will never be able to explain any supposed “cures” without some strained logic (Pitt’s crew at the World Health Organization developed a vaccine to “camouflage” people from the zombies), but if you were willing to suspend disbelief, the movie was worth the time just to see the visual — I have never seen anything like it — of thousands of bodies crawling over each other and building a living wall, so to speak, of the undead. That visually stunning moment was worth two hours of my time and the price of a matinee.
Human depth, measured in flesh, is about as deep as this movie goes, however. As far as the characters go, this has to be one of Pitt’s weakest roles and performances. I might remember Gerry Lane a year from now solely because I just wrote a review about his fight against zombies. I will remember Tyler Durden and Mickey O’Neil because of Pitt’s immersion in the characters. In “World War Z,” Pitt was immersed in zombies, that’s for sure, but with the character, Gerry Lane? Not so much. It was almost as if Pitt was acting — pun intended, of course — on cruise control. But that’s not Pitt’s fault. Then again, since Pitt co-produced the film, I guess it kind of is.
So, in essence, the take away lesson from Pitt’s latest epic: If you can only manage to come down with a dreadful case of severe acute respiratory syndrome, lymphoma or sickle cell anemia, you might be able to survive an impending zombie takeover, assuming that you, with your newfound pathogen, live long enough to see it.
[rating:61/100]