Review: World War Z (2013)

Cast: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz
Director: Marc Forster
Country: USA | Malta
Genre: Action | Drama | Horror | Sci-Fi | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: For an additional perspective on the World War Z, read Larry’s review.

World War Z (2013) was directed by Marc Forster (who directed the great Monsters Ball, Finding Neverland and Stranger than Fiction and the less than great Bond picture Quantum of Solace) and was written by everyone in Hollywood.  It’s a much tighter and tenser film than is usually the case with 47 writers and holds together fairly well.

The story is that of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) who is a former UN something or other that I’m guessing killed people.  He’s left that job so he can be with his family and escape the stress of whatever it was he used to do.  He and his wife Karin (Mareille Enos) and his two daughters Constance (Sterling Jerins) and Rachel (Abigail Hargrove) are packing up to go somewhere.  They get stuck in traffic which turns out to be some kind of an attack.

The last third is also a huge shift in tone and feels like it maybe belongs in a different version of the film.  Everything else is on such a large scale that these parts seem a bit out of place, despite how good they are. 

They hustle into an RV (not theirs) and hightail it out of Philadelphia toward Newark.  Gerry is in contact with his old boss, Thierry (Fana Mokoena), who is going to evacuate the family to safety.  When they get on the helicopter, now plus one more kid Thomas (Fabrizio Guido) who was in the apartment the family found and Thomas’ parents were kind enough to let them stay until morning when the helicopter came.  Unfortunately, just after the Lanes left, zombies invaded and Thomas somehow go out and up to the roof to be saved.  So now the Lanes have adopted him, I guess.

They are taken to an aircraft carrier fleet coordinating the effort of survival.  The Lanes can stay only if Gerry goes out into the world to help discover what started this.  It turns out it’s a virus that spreads, making people into zombies (but they don’t really like to say that because they don’t want to believe the zombie apocalypse can happen).  They figure if they can find out where it started, they can stop it.

So it’s off to a military base in South Korea where an email was sent from days prior warning of something going on.  There’s no way to find the first infected here because the doctor was bitten and the whole medical bay burned to kill him and the people he bit.  Along with the people, the research was destroyed in the fire.  Sitting in a prison cell nearby was an ex-CIA agent who had sold guns to North Korea, which is why he’s in a prison cell.  He says that North Korea is unaffected because they pulled everyone’s teeth.  No teeth, no bites, no virus.  Also that Israel is unaffected because they sealed their borders a few days before the outbreak.

Off to Israel now, to discover how they knew and if they know how cure it.  They don’t and due to some people near the wall securing Jerusalem making too much noise (the zombies are attracted by noise) they figure out a way to climb the wall and into Jerusalem they go.  Gerry gets out with an Israeli soldier, Segen (Daniella Kertesz), with him now.  He saved her from turning after being bitten on the hand by cutting off her hand.  How she doesn’t bleed out, I’m not sure, but she doesn’t so she’s his new best friend.  They make it to a just landed plane and get in.  Gerry calls Thierry and gets the location of a WHO facility because he has an idea of how to help save the non-infected.

Watching World War Z, I felt like I was seeing what was going on globally during Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) which took a very micro approach (as most zombie pictures do) to the viral epidemic of zombies and fast moving ones at that.

The scenes at the WHO facility are where the story is the best because it slows down and allows tension to build.  I won’t go too much into it, but this is where most of the fear is.  Sure, it’s not a walk in the park when thousands of fast zombies are running at a also large group of people and everyone not infected panics, but the tension in the last third of the film is what elevates the film.

The last third is also a huge shift in tone and feels like it maybe belongs in a different version of the film.  Everything else is on such a large scale that these parts seem a bit out of place, despite how good they are.  I think this part of the film works best because Forster is much more adept at small-scale storytelling.  His large films tend to be not that good because he doesn’t have a sense of style or tone, he just goes big so he isn’t sent home.

Watching World War Z, I felt like I was seeing what was going on globally during Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) which took a very micro approach (as most zombie pictures do) to the viral epidemic of zombies and fast moving ones at that.  So while Gerry was going around the world, trying to find the origin of the disease, I kept thinking that it was from the monkeys in the lab in London he was looking for and Jim was off trying to save Selena and Hannah.  The two kind of work together to tell a similar story (the zombies even act similarly), one of the homefront fight and the other of the global conflict, kind of like the difference between a British WWII era film and an American one.

For all of the writers that worked on the picture, from the great J. Michael Straczynski to Drew Goddard and Damon Lindelof (who were brought in to doctor up the script and fix an apparently terrible ending), I think it’s amazing that the finished product turned out as well as it did.  There’s nothing earth-shattering about World War Z, but it’s a solid, tense popcorn film that is as scary as it is fun.  The tonal shift makes sense, and so does Gerry’s theory (to a point).  The biggest problem I had with it was its rating.  They chopped the film up to make a PG-13 rating from what was probably an R film.  So much of the action stops short of being terrifying because of the limitations set forward to achieve a PG-13 rating and get more butts in the seats.  I think it would have been more effective and the bigger sequences much more horrific if they weren’t concerned with marketing this not-for-kids movie to kids.  I’m not a blood-and-guts kind of filmgoer, but I would rather see it where it is needed than wish it were there to make a complete sequence.  That’s what it felt like: unfinished.  In an effort to pander, the film feels like it wasn’t completed.  I’ll still see World War Z 2 when it hits theaters in 2015 or 2016 because the sequel was set up pretty well, I just hope it’s a finished film.

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Doug Heller

Sr. Staff Film Critic

I believe film occupies a rare place as art, entertainment, historical records and pure joy. I love all films, good and bad, from every time period with an affinity to Classical Hollywood in general, but samurai, sci-fi and noir specifically. My BA is in Film Studies from Pitt and my MA is in Education. My goal is to be able to ignite a love of film in others that is similar to my own.

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