For all of the delays, rewrites, and reshoots that plagued World War Z, it turned out to be a solid summer action flick. The irony, though, is the thing that might be its most festering infection is the plague itself.
World War Z would be better if it weren’t a zombie movie.
That’s not to say there shouldn’t be legions of infected undead swarming all over the place, because those things actually are pretty awesome. But when something markets itself as a “zombie movie,” it inevitably takes on certain baggage. Zombies — and the movies, TV shows, and comics about them — have a rich history and certain tropes that demand to be acknowledged. If they’re not, it’s hard to get past the cognitive dissonance created by a movie, no matter how enjoyable it might be, that isn’t what it’s billed as. It’s as if a scrawny, insecure Thor appeared in an Avengers flick. It might be an interesting story or character study, but that dude wouldn’t be a truly Asgardian superhero.
Similarly, if you’re a fan of gory zombie action and you’re going to this PG-13 flick looking for your bloody fix of gore, you might leave wanting.
Of course, changing up the zombie game is exactly what director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) and his fellow filmmakers set out to do. During a recent screening of World War Z in San Francisco, the movie’s star and producer Brad Pitt introduced the film by saying, “If you think you’re just about to see another zombie film, you’re in for a bit of a shock. … This thing is big, it’s like nothing you’ve seen before.”
He’s right.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points for World War Z in the text below.)
The movie, a fast-paced race by one man to stop a total zombie apocalypse, isn’t like a lot of zombie fare, which tends to focus on a small group of people fighting the undead in rural (or at least abandoned) surroundings.
Before we go any further, though, a quick primer: World War Z — loosely based on the book by Max (son of Mel) Brooks — is an enjoyable action movie in which former United Nations investigator Gerry Lane, played by Pitt, finds himself, his wife and two young daughters in the midst of a worldwide undead epidemic. The family escapes with help from Lane’s U.N. connections, but by calling in that favor he is asked to trace the source of the disease and stop it. He goes from South Korea, scene of one of the first reported cases, to Jerusalem, which has built a wall to keep the undead out, and ultimately to a World Health Organization facility.
His journey is a nail-biter. (We have the cuticles to prove it.) And in addition to being suspenseful, the flick drives home the personal and global reactions such an outbreak would bring. In a key moment, Lane believes he may have been infected and stands on the roof of a towering apartment building prepared to jump, knowing he’s better off dead than a threat to his family. That’s as real as it gets. Also telling are the geopolitical reactions and their ties to real-world politics. North Korea, for example, staves off an invasion of the undead by removing everyone’s teeth so they can’t bite. Such undertones make World War Z as intelligent as it is shocking.
That said, it could use a little more feeling and character development, but, hey, you can only tell so much story in a couple hours.
But considering the tweaking done to zombie lore, it could’ve just as easily been about another kind of outbreak and been just as poignant. And maybe it should have. As Annalee Newitz at io9 notes, “Maybe the problem with World War Z is that zombie movies require a certain amount of weirdness or subversiveness to succeed. Turning a zombie pandemic into a generic disaster movie robs the zombies of their dirty, nasty edginess and robs the disaster of its epic scope.”
Bingo. But what if World War Z didn’t call itself a zombie movie?
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