Audiences are
not meant to know anything about a film’s production, and when they do it’s
normally not a good thing. One of the most notorious flops in recent history is
Andrew Stanton’s John Carter, and
part of that is likely because everyone was throwing feces at it long before a
single person even got a chance to see the thing. The expensive budget and bad buzz preceded it, and
by the time it came out the stench kept just about everyone away. Whether or
not the movie was actually good or not didn’t matter. For the Brad Pitt
zombie blockbuster World War Z, it
seemed as if the same thing was destined to happen. Much of the press related to
the film last year involved its ballooning budget, the lack of an ending, and
everyone’s general problems with director Marc Forster. The whole enterprise
seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.
Rarely is a
production like that able to rally all the way back, and while World War Z isn’t a great movie, or even
a very good one, it’d be difficult for an uninformed person to guess that this was a
troubled production. Really, this is a run-of-the-mill Hollywood apocalypse
thriller that owes quite a lot to movies like Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds along with just about everything that came after. There’s nothing
particularly creative about it, but it’s a functional film that is almost
always watchable and occasionally actively entertaining. It’s a rare case of
the filmmakers righting the ship after just about everything that could have
gone wrong did go wrong. That it’s able to be adequate entertainment is no
small feat, though that’s admittedly a dangerous bar by which to judge a movie.
Brad Pitt is
Gerry Lane, who finds himself protecting his family after a zombie apocalypse
breaks out on the streets of Philadelphia. He is saved by the United Nations,
but the only way to guarantee the safety of his wife (Mireille Enos) and
daughters (Abigal Hargrove and Sterling Jerins) is to join up with his old UN
cohorts and search for the source of the zombie virus. This takes them on a
journey through South Korea, Israel, and Wales looking for some way to hold off
the chaos.
While World War Z never crosses the line into
being truly terrible, the first two acts are easily the least interesting. The
action starts almost immediately and doesn’t let up for a long while, and
Forster’s challenges with objects in motion continue to be a mild problem. His
work is better here than in Quantum of
Solace, but it still brings almost nothing to the table. He’s better off
staying away from action as much as possible, and so long as he’s doing that
he’s actually able to generate some nifty shocks in this movie. Most of them are
hollow, and I will be having precisely zero nightmares tonight, but I'm not afraid to admit I jumped a
couple of times. Considering all the controversy that surrounded the ending,
it’s more than a little surprising that I enjoyed that part of the movie the
most. That’s the only point when Forster seems to be in complete control of the
proceedings, and while the ultimate climax is a tad obvious Pitt’s performance
is able to make it work. For much of its running time, World War Z feels like it’s running around without anywhere to go.
When it finally settles on a destination, it’s surprisingly surefooted.
Even so,
confident mediocrity is still mediocrity. From a story standpoint, there is
precisely nothing that separates World
War Z from the disaster movie pack. In fact, it has far more in common with
alien invasion movies than it does zombie movies. Most zombie movies exist
exclusively in the horror genre, and they are more intimate affairs in which
the main group of characters must stare their own demise in the face as it
slowly lurches toward them. They may not move quickly, but joining their ranks
seems almost inevitable. The intentions of World
War Z are evident from the start, as the zombies in this movie move with
the speed of world-class sprinters. This is not a horror movie. It’s a PG-13
action film that looks to deliver thrills to the largest possible audience.
There may not be much genuine terror to be found here, and it might have taken
a lot of blood, sweat and tears to finish this movie that is ultimately just okay, but it’s a slight relief to see that World War Z at least has a pulse. It
is simple entertainment, but it’s often effective. That’s a considerable
accomplishment for a project that not long ago seemed on the brink of calamity.
Grade: B-
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