Runtime: 1 hour, 55 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Marc Forster
Quick Impressions:
Last night as I lay awake despite my best efforts to sleep, I got a random flash of a scene from the movie Keeping the Faith (which I haven’t seen in thirteen years). Out of nowhere, I thought, “It’s so sad that for Mel Brooks that Anne Bancroft died. I wonder if they had any famous kids?” The answer is “yes.” Their son Max Brooks wrote the book World War Z on which the movie is based. I didn’t know that until I got home tonight and my mother mentioned that my sister had told her, adding, “Apparently, he wanted to tell a story about bringing all the people of the world together.” Mission accomplished, Max Brooks. That was definitely the message I got from the film. We all need to work together to save our world from unthinkable dangers that we prefer to deny are coming. I think I’ll read your book now.
In between mesmerizing, pulse-pounding, visceral yet oddly artistic chase scenes (which are the backbone of the movie), World War Z actually parcels out some genuinely intriguing ideas. (That’s nice because it keeps your intellect busy as you react instinctually to the captivating chase scenes.)
Not having read the book first, I didn’t know what to expect from World War Z. Well, I mean, I expected Brad Pitt and zombies, and it definitely delivers that. And from the opening credits, my expectations enlarged to include that really charismatic cancer patient from Flight (James Badge Dale), the “other” Cabin in the Woods screenwriter (Drew Goddard), hmm the Prometheus guy (Damon Lindelof), and…the director of Finding Neverland!!! I was actually really excited to see Marc Forster’s name pop up as the director. That gave me high hopes. I usually like the films he helms. (Finding Neverland, in fact, is one of those rare films that I saw multiple times in the theater. Normally I’m more of a “see as many releases as possible once” type.)
And as it turns out, I did like World War Z, very much actually. It’s just the right mix of popcorn flick, serious cinematic art, Brad Pitt vehicle, and thought-provoking commentary on our times. (Part of me wants to add Jurassic Park homage, but I’ll refrain because when I mentioned to my husband how similar the final act was to the ending of Jurassic Park, he didn’t seem to be right there with me. So maybe it’s just me. Don’t get me wrong. The premise isn’t similar—it’s just the way the last big action scene looks and sounds. Viscerally, it’s Jurassic Park all over again, but in terms of actual plot, something entirely different is going on.)
The Good:
Watching, I couldn’t help but wonder, Is this what Brad Pitt’s real life is like? He travels the world, walking around in casual clothes, asking questions, thinking about his kids, avoiding the hordes of slobbering, soulless zombies who chomp their teeth for a bite of his supple Brad Pitt flesh (you know, the paparazzi)? Didn’t Angelina Jolie used to work for the UN? I’m pretty sure she was a goodwill ambassador.
Without a doubt, Brad Pitt is the perfect star to carry this movie. (Basically, he’s the only star. Besides Pitt, the two biggest names in the cast are probably Matthew Fox and David Morse.) But watching the trailers, I never thought the lack of other stars was odd. Brad Pitt is one of the few people big enough to open a movie as the star. He’s a talented, charismatic actor who has proven himself equally capable of carrying summer blockbusters and Oscar-baity-stuff. My sister (who practically had a shrine to him when she was in junior high) thinks that he’s losing his looks, but I find him more attractive as he ages. He has a wonderful everyman quality, pretty bizarre considering that he’s also possibly the most paparazzi-chased, blogged-about leading man in the world. (When I try to think of someone to rival him for that dubious honor, I only come up with Tom Cruise. I’m sure there are others, but not many at that level.)
Anyway, Pitt is perfect as (no longer) retired UN specialist Gerry Lane (at least to someone who has not read the book). World War Z trailers promised me Brad Pitt on the run from zombies, and the film certainly delivers that. If it had delivered only that, frankly, I would have been satisfied.
But despite the less than star-studded cast, World War Z actually gives us a delightfully rich ensemble. Pitt is definitely the star, but he’s joined by some of the most fresh, compelling, original, varied supporting characters in recent memory. I flat out loved several of the other characters in this film and the performances of the actors portraying them.
For me, Daniella Kertesz as Segen was such a nice surprise. How often does a big budget popcorn movie surprise us with a female character who is not there as a potential love interest/sex object? Usually if a female is not going to be a love interest, she’s there as some type of foil for the actual love interest, and/or a villain, and if neither of those things, she’s some kind of comic relief (i.e. she’s in an action scenario but she’s really girly and can’t stop talking and squealing). But this character is actually pretty interesting just as a person. She gets quite a bit of development, and it’s almost all non-verbal. She also manages to be tough without becoming a clichéd just-one-of-the-(but-tougher-than)-guys caricature, the remaining possibility for a stock female action character. I really liked her.
There’s another great female character in the movie, too. As one of the WHO doctors in Cardiff, Ruth Negga was just so compelling. I found her fascinating and really likable. Her colleagues (particularly Peter Capaldi and Pierfrancesco Favino) are pretty great, too, particularly when they’re giving off a sinister, mysterious vibe, like they’ve wandered in from some horror movie set in Not London. (How many great old horror movies are there where the protagonist leaves London for parts unknown and runs into trouble and sinister weirdos?)
Fana Mokoena is quite good, too, as Thierry Umutoni, Gerry’s boss at the UN. (“Boss at the UN” sounds a little informal, but you get the idea.) Mokoena has few scenes and limited lines, but the character and Gerry Lane clearly have a long, complicated past, and Mokoena manages to convey surprising emotion non-verbally.
I guess what I really love is that all of these characters seem to be coming from somewhere. They don’t just show up to participate. They all have a history, a life, a backstory (as people do), and even though we don’t have time in this story to find out in great detail where they all come from, they all behave as if they’re actual people influenced by things that have happened to them before, and headed somewhere important to them in the future.
The characters feel real.
Too often, when you assemble a large international cast, the emphasis on the cast’s amazing diversity is too pointed and awkward and eclipses all the characters as individuals. But these people aren’t making a great show of being diverse. They just genuinely are a very diverse group of people working together for a common good, and they come across as extremely real individuals.
The least interesting character is Lane’s wife Karin, but the actress (Mireille Enos) does a good job portraying her in a performance that shows the intensity and difficulty of just sitting and waiting helplessly by the phone.
Funniest Scene:
This is not a funny movie. I am sure there must be jokes, but I don’t remember any. It’s pretty intense right from the start.
But there are some darkly funny moments. What happens to the scientist (I mean Dr. Fassbach played by Elyes Gabel) is definitely amusing with enough detachment. Not funny haha, more ironic (and that mainly in the Alanis Morisette sense of being extremely inconvenient). I honestly did not see that coming. (“Who would have thought? It figures!”) It makes the movie so much better because it’s so unexpected and yet so likely. Dr. Fassbach’s little adventure seems the most likely outcome for me if I ever had the unlikely honor of becoming a crucial person in a global war on zombies.
I also laughed out loud (accidentally) at some very conspicuous product placement. Really, there’s this one part that should be an actual commercial. It would be a really good commercial. The coolest guy in the world wants the product, celebrates with the product, and then everybody runs toward the product. (Of course, it would make an even better commercial for the competitor, showing that its product is not for mob-mentality zombies.)
Best Scene:
The little speech Dr. Fassbach gives to Gerry as they fly off on their mission together is really great. Up to that point, I was thinking, “Boy, for a movie that’s supposed to feature Brad Pitt and zombies, this sure does deliver.” But when Fassbach started talking, I realized that World War Z was going to deliver a bit more. I was so pleasantly surprised.
What he says there is just so interesting. Not only is it compelling and well written, but it’s also vital information that (thankfully) Gerry is enough of a thinker to remember, reflect on, and make use of.
But that’s just the scene that first stood out as something more and caught my attention.
The best (and most memorable) part of the movie is the stuff that happens in Israel. Now, obviously, it’s not like end-of-the-world movies never feature Jerusalem. But often the movies that go out of their way to focus on Jerusalem turn out to be a bit disappointing, less than smart, lazy.
This one is very clever. Gerry Lane’s entire conversation with Mossad leader Jurgen Warmbruggen really fascinated me. I found myself wondering, Is the guy who wrote the book Jewish, maybe even Israeli, or maybe someone just interested in Israel, some historian? Warmbruggen’s line of reasoning makes a crazy kind of sense, and yet I don’t remember hearing anything quite like that as a plot element in a movie before. And the stuff about our unwillingness to prepare for things we don’t want to believe are happening is, in its own way, brilliant. There’s an incredibly interesting subtext to this movie. I didn’t really go in expecting to think.
Best Scene Visually:
The scramble over the wall (shown briefly in every trailer for the film I’ve seen) is in some ways the most satisfying scene in the movie.
For one thing, it’s a great visual metaphor. There’s trouble in the world? Well then, let’s just build a great big wall and keep everybody out of here but us.
Let’s isolate ourselves from the problem and try to ignore it. What’s that you say? They’re climbing over the wall?????? Who could have foreseen that?
Lane also gets an important clue in this scene. This movie is great about being pointed yet artful all at once. It definitely draws our attention to certain things, but we look because we enjoy the experience of watching. It’s never clunky.
Best Action Sequence:
This movie is mostly action, and the action is mostly chase scenes of various types (run away and don’t look back, run away and kill whatever you can, move quickly and silently to evade capture…until you have to run away). The chase sequences are like flashy set pieces, and we move from one to the next until the film finally stops.
Normally I’m not big on action. (I mean, I like action movies, just not the actual action.) Lots of times I lose focus from a kind of sensory overload and can’t even follow what’s happening. (And sometimes that’s best because in certain movies, the whole purpose of the action scenes is to create the most pointless, extravagant, expensive, outlandish CGI explosion bonanza of all time.)
But this movie has action scenes that are—how can I put this?—pretty. This probably will not sound like an endorsement to some action fans, but don’t worry. There’s plenty of zombie carnage involved, too. But even though there’s danger and disgusting zombies, there’s always a certain underlying elegance to the scenes themselves. Everything that happens is very fluid, like a flowing river, and Marco Beltrami’s accompanying score always seems the ideal complement to the frenzied flight. We feel the heightened suspense of the frenzied chaos. The threat is menacing and palpable, but it still looks good as it’s unfolding on the screen. There’s a well-choreographed quality to the action scenes, but it’s not obtrusive. The characters experience fear, pain, panic, and watching, we feel their urgency, but we feel it as an odd kind of pleasure, like a delicious second-hand endorphin rush that at moments is truly exhilarating.
I really enjoyed watching the flight and pursuit. And, as an added plus, the action scenes made total sense to me. When it comes to action movies, maybe I don’t always understand how certain weapons work, or why various buildings must explode, but running away? I totally get that. And if a disease-ridden zombie horde were chasing me, you’d better believe I’d run. Trust me, I flinched when the guy sitting next to me cleared his throat because I didn’t want to get his exhaled germs on my hands—and the guy sitting next to me was my husband. If somebody was going to infect me with zombie plague, I would run like Hell.
That said, my favorite action sequence was the bicycle race through the rain—because you don’t go into a blockbuster zombie movie expecting to see that on screen!
(I was kidding just now, by the way. It was not my husband who exhaled germs on me. It was the stranger sitting on my other side. My husband is well aware that I am crazy and knows that coughing in my direction is a bad idea.)
The Negatives:
As long as it’s on the screen, World War Z pretty successfully sustains the illusion of being far more substantial than it actually is. There’s really not a whole lot to it. In one way, it’s just a bunch of cool, big-budget chase scenes strung together by a premise that is bigger on menace than actual resolution. (If you think of the whole thing as a metaphor for real-world problems, it’s actually kind of depressing because it gives you the idea that the only “solution” possible is stalling long enough to feel some glimmer of hope and maybe dying before we learn the hope was in vain. Well maybe that’s an overly negative interpretation. Maybe it’s just vague at the ending because it’s trying to launch a franchise. Let’s go for that instead. Let’s hope.)
The final act of the movie is the weakest, but it’s still quite enjoyable to watch. (It really does feel like Jurassic Park, though, with zombies in place of raptors.) To me, it felt like they actually arrived at a solution half an hour before the movie ended, but then they realized, “Well, that’s not actually very exciting for the ending of a movie, some guy having the right idea! Let’s add another scene of zombie evasion/running away.” To make the movie interesting, Gerry Lane not only has to go from A to B to C, he has to get to A, make a realization, and then RUN AWAY. Get to B, find something out, and then RUN AWAY! And so on. The last episode of running away feels like it’s just thrown in there because the audience needs to look at something exciting in order to get a satisfying sensation of closure. After watching every sequence of the film conclude with Gerry dramatically running away, we’d feel ripped off if we didn’t get some variation on that as part of the ending.
Those who have read the book may find more to criticize here since I’ve heard there are significant changes. But I know nothing about the book (except that I’d like to read it now because some ideas expressed in the film intrigue me), so I’m the wrong person to ask. For the most part, the movie works.
Overall:
This will never be my favorite movie because I like more humor, more dialogue, less action, (no zombies!), but I can’t find fault with much about World War Z. If you’re looking for an elegantly made zombie film that keeps you on the edge of your seat yet also provides aesthetically pleasing scenes and some fascinating social commentary, this movie is as perfect as you could hope for. It’s one of the better films I’ve seen so far this summer, actually. It’s fast-paced, exciting, coherent, and well-acted with some thought-provoking lines, memorable scenes, and the most exhilarating plane crash I’ve seen since Flight.
If you’re looking to spend an evening at the movies, you could definitely do worse than World War Z. (Seriously, if you don’t pick this movie, odds are you’ll pick something at least marginally worse. I’ve seen most of the other movies playing right now. I know.) World War Z is pretty solid summer entertainment with plenty of excitement and a few ideas that may stick with you after the credits roll.