Aside from the occasional “2012”, we don’t get many big disaster movies these days, but thankfully director Marc Forster and star/producer Brad Pitt have decided to combine both disaster movies and zombie flicks for the surprisingly effective “World War Z”. One of the better surprises of the summer, the film packs a punch when it comes to suspense, thrills and a well done protagonist.
Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) has given up his previous job in the government to spend time with his family. However, the family’s ordinary day is immediately interrupted by an attack of raging zombies, creatures who move at accelerated speed and bring death and destruction in their path. While trying to avoid these undead monsters, Lane is recruited to help track down information on the situation, while trying to live in a world that’s becoming more and more dangerous by the second.
The book “World War Z” is phenomenally different from the movie, but like I said in my “The Great Gatsby” review, I don’t care how a film matches it’s literary source so long as it’s got some quality storytelling on it’s own. Thankfully and, let’s not kid ourselves here after those terrible ads earlier this year, surprisingly, “World War Z” is a good movie, one that actually has several moments of true greatness.
Marc Forster has certainly improved on his directing of big budget franchise movies after the disaster of “Quantum of Solace”, doing an admirable job of capturing all of the terror this new zombie infested world creates. To boot, Brad Pitt similarly brings his A-game for the lead role in this flick, showing him to be a relatable guy who also takes on an interesting and unexpected detective-esque angle during the film. This comes whenever he’s trying to inspect where this whole zombie fiasco originated, and he makes scenes that could’ve been nothing more than dull exposition into riveting sequences demonstrating Pitt’s ability to grab the audiences attention even when doing nothing (if only such an ability could’ve been used to salvage the abomination that is “Killing Them Softly”).
The film is also tightly paced, never leaving the audience too long without a grand set piece, but also giving people enough time to take in all the action that’s occurring. It’s a tough balance to hit, but the movie does hit it well. Also, the dark tone of this movie is unique in that it has several characters suffer meaningful sacrifices and deaths, one’s whose impacts are truly felt in both the story and the emotional presence of the film. This kind of effective emotion only helps add to the film’s impressively realistic setting.
The finale itself is expertly staged, usually resorting to not showing us the zombies for more than a few seconds for most of it, and also makes great use of the characters necessity to be entirely silent to create many great suspenseful moments. But once Pitt comes face to face with a zombie, it’s almost humorous, with the monsters chattering teeth resembling a chipmunk instead of one of George R. Romero’s horrific zombies. Thankfully, we don’t get such a close up for the rest of the movie, but it severely damages much of the film’s impact for the remainder of Gerry’s quest. On the bright side, the rest of the film’s use of zombies is spectacular and makes great use of restraint to enhance the films amount of genuinely scary moments.
I honestly thought the film would’ve been a disaster, but “World War Z” is a well done piece of disaster cinema. The suspense is thrilling and Brad Pitt creates a great main character, although the films use of the zombies and the protagonists family towards the end are subpar. I did have a lot of fun with “World War Z”, and aside from a some glaring problems with the script, I think most people will too.
