World War Z — A Review

Hmmm… World War Z? There was a book? Really?

OK, here’s the thing, as I posted a couple of posts back (“Books to Movies…”), I always worry when a book gets turned into a movie. World War Z is the reason why. Here we had a very successful book, #1 on the charts for a while, which wrote about a “zombie” war in the past tense. The book included several stories, in documentary fashion, surrounding separate (but a little bit connected) incidents which took place during the war. It was a fascinating read and after reading it you ended up with an overall, over-arching understanding of the complete war and what happened during it. Great book. I read it because I heard they were releasing a movie of it and I was interested in zombies so I wanted to read it before the movie came out. Today I saw the movie based on the book…. very, very loosely based.

Don’t read the book.

Wait, let me rephrase that. Read the book… It is really a great book and you would be better off reading it even if you’re just not that into zombies.

Forget everything you read in the book.

That’s better. World War Z, the movie, has virtually nothing to do with the book. Sure, it has some common elements. Zombies, for one. It’s good they got that. There’s some type of infection that makes people undead. It is on a global scale. That is about where the likeness ends. This is a different story. Now that that’s been said, I can give you a better review of World War Z as a standalone movie. If you go to see it, forget the book. This isn’t it.

Within ten minutes World War Z gets right into the thick of things by thrusting you, straight out of the gate, into zombie hordes. These aren’t your average, Night of the Living Dead (read that as the original), slow, lumbering zombies. These are the run faster than you, leap on your head, tear off your face, 28 Days Later style zombies. (If you haven’t seen that movie reference, then apparently you don’t like zombies and you have missed a quintessential zombie movie which changed a lot of common movie perceptions about zombies). The story is basic, very basic,… find where it originated and try to find a way to stop it.

World War Z is good in that it takes what the viewer normally sees in zombie movies and applies it on a larger, global scale. That is great. We normally see masses of undead slowly ganging up on small groups of people who are left over after the zombie apocalypse. Look at the hugely popular Walking Dead series. A great show, but it only shows us a small portion of the United States and doesn’t waver much from there. WWZ takes us out of that comfort zone and thrusts us from Philadelphia, to Korea, to Israel, to England. It really helps to open up some of our previous experiences of the zombie apocalypse. The storyline, though somewhat simple, is well written and shows us a few things we haven’t seen before in a zombie movie (the big wall with zombies climbing over each other to get to the top, which they showed in the trailer). And the main character is played by star actor Brad Pitt. Pitt does very well portraying our savior, traipsing across the planet, looking for a way to stop it all.

The effects are great. Very realistic CGI city destruction, zombie hordes, and zombie deaths. There is also not that much gore. No eyes popping out of heads or blood splattering the walls so even though the zombies may be scary and gross, they are not too graphic for the squeamish in the audience. Not like a true horror film in which we see flesh ripping and heads exploding. This movie is not about the blood factor. Explosions are awesome. There are many times zombies leap out at you making you flinch. The facial traits and motions of the zombies are definitely scary enough to make some cringe.

What WWZ doesn’t give us is something completely new… other than ignoring the original book that is. We’ve seen most of this before, here and there, in other movies. There is not much truly new. The special effects makes it feel fresh. Having a big time actor as part of the movie makes it more visible among the throng of movies and possibly gather a much larger than intended audience. And the international settings make us go, “Whoa, it’s everywhere,” and feel a little more globally connected. But, overall, it’s really not much we haven’t seen before.

Don’t get me wrong. I pretty much liked the movie; I like zombie movies and scary movies just as much as the next person. I even like Brad Pitt and his acting. But I kept feeling there was something missing. The story is overly simplistic, and somewhat rushed. The lead role could have been played by almost anyone and had the movie turn out the same (though it certainly wouldn’t get the same box office pull). And if you’ve seen the trailers for the film, you pretty much know most of the movie and have seen a lot of the ‘cool factor’ scenes. I had higher hopes for this movie, but the high expectations were not met.

If you like zombies… Good! You should go see this film. If you like Brad Pitt… Maybe you should see this. If you don’t like zombies, but like Brad Pitt, I don’t think you’d care much for this movie. Overall, this is a good try to bring zombies into the forefront of motion pictures, to maybe give it more credibility as a genre. But really, it feels more like a movie company attempting to cash in on the recent zombie craze. As mentioned before, I liked this film as a zombie flick, but it’s just not ‘great.’

And I really believe if they stayed more true to the original book, it would make a much more fascinating tale (or a series).

I rate this effort 7.5 out of 10.