World War Z
I’m not sure if I’ve seen a film this year that polarized me quite as much as Marc Forster’s “World War Z,” and honestly, it has nothing to do with the troubled production that resulted in a dramatic third-act rewrite. As a whole, Forster’s film, based (rather loosely, I’m told) on the cult book by Max Brooks, has a story that flows with surprising narrative cohesion. However, the way the film plays is more like one, two-hour video game, where the viewer has no control over the Brad Pitt-played avatar at the center of it. I’m not the biggest video game nerd out there, but I’ve played enough to know that some sequences in this film are lifted straight from the medium.
But Forster and Pitt, who also produced the film, are kind of sneaky in how they approached the story of a zombie apocalypse. When the film starts, and zombies begin running amuck, Pitt’s Gerry– a former UN employee with experience in war zones –is living the quiet life with his family. Things have started getting out of control due to an unknown virus of some sort, but most people still live relatively easy lives. All that’s about to change for Gerry and his family, however, and he is called in by a makeshift UN leadership structure to try and track down the origins of this global outbreak. Of course, with the undead on the warpath, and a potential global loss of life climbing into the billions, the type of globe-trotting we’re used to seeing in movies such as this is easier said than done.
Having Pitt’s character at the center seems like a pure movie star diva move, but from what I know of the book, it’s in keeping with the source material. It also does something crucial, as well: it keeps the focus on the personal, while also illuminating the larger picture. The movie I kept coming back to during “World War Z” was Steven Spielberg’s criminally-underrated adaptation of “War of the Worlds,” which cast Tom Cruise as a dead-beat dad who had to learn how to be a grown-up and good parent when aliens attacked. Gerry’s arc isn’t quite the same, but the focus on family is an important one: Gerry doesn’t want to get back into the game; however, if he doesn’t, he and his family would be considered “unnecessary personel,” and their safety in the outside world wouldn’t be assured. There are some top-notch writer credited on this film– with Matthew Michael Carnahan (“The Kingdom,” “Lions for Lambs”), Drew Goddard (“Cloverfield,” “The Cabin in the Woods”), and Damon Lindelof (“Prometheus,” “Star Trek Into Darkness”) on the screenplay, with Matthew Michael Carnahan and J. Michael Straczynski (“Thor,” “Changeling”) credited for the screen story –and how they all managed to keep this centered in on the individual story while also helping Forster (“Quantum of Solace,” “Stranger Than Fiction,” “Monster’s Ball,” “Finding Neverland”) make it all seem like something we should care about is almost miraculous.
So what’s the problem? What has me nagging about whether I can recommend this flick or not? I think the fact that it could have been more than just a mass-produced Hollywood blockbuster. Brooks subtitled his book, “An Oral History of the Zombie War,” and THAT touch adds considerable intrigue to something we’ve had filmmakers speculate about since George A. Romero began his zombie saga with 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead.” Since then, plenty of other filmmakers have been finding ways to put a spin on Romero’s iconic premise, from Edgar Wright in “Shaun of the Dead” to Danny Boyle in “28 Days Later” to Jonathan Levine in this year’s “Warm Bodies” to the “Resident Evil” movies and games to “The Walking Dead” on TV. In the end, “World War Z” just feels like a “Resident Evil” movie with one of the biggest stars in the world at its center, and even though Forster has some put together some great set pieces and jolts in this film (most memorable are the scenes on a passenger jet and in a WHO outpost in Wales), and the film is far more interesting than “Resident Evil” ever was, one can’t help but wonder if something a little more special couldn’t have been carved from such promising material.
