Summer Of Films: World War Zzzzz (2013)

Why did they make World War Z? I’m thinking it was meant as a sleep aid. On the other hand, maybe there really is a need for Brad Pitt to appear in a generic zombie movie? Most likely, they heard people talking about how the book should be made into a movie, so some Hollywood smart-ass bought the right to use the characters and the title of the book, though not the contents of the book, and slapped those onto a standard zombie film? Oy.

The Plot

If you heard that this was going to be a smarter zombie film, then you’ve been misled. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. Some dude wrote a book called World War Z. This book involved a UN scientist who roams the world tracing the beginnings of a zombie outbreak. As the infection slowly spreads, this scientist and others struggle to find a cure. After some time, the outbreak finally gets out of hand and a bigger struggle begins between the uninfected humans and the infected. Along the way, the book deals very intelligently with the idea of a zombie infection. Remember that? Well, forget it.

The film starts with Pitt and his family driving through New York City. Within seconds, the zombies attack. Within seconds more, New York City is lost to the zombies. Fortunately, Brad and family flee on traffic free roads in an RV they just happen to find to Newark, where they go a lootin’ and then break into an apartment building looking for safety from the roving bands of zombies. It’s possible this is just a normal night in Newark, but I suspect we’re meant to see this as zombie-related.

Anyway, the US is destroyed before the night is over, but Brad and family get saved and taken to live on a warship off the coast, provided that he agrees to investigate the zombie plague. He agrees and they ship him to Korea because someone in Korea wrote the word “zombies” in an e-mail... no, I'm not kidding. From there he goes to Israel and then Britain to meet Dr. Who.

With the exception of Israel, everything is destroyed, and Israel gets destroyed in a ridiculous way while Brad is there. In fact, throughout, the film does a very poor job of handling how this would really happen. For example, Israel builds a huge wall to keep out the zombies, which works until Brad arrives, at which point the zombies suddenly decide to climb the wall and the Israelis prove helpless. Huh? Why now? As Brad flees Israel, he jumps on board a commercial airliners... which was going exactly where? There's nowhere for it to go, so it takes him to where he needs to go, but it crashes, but he survives it because he's the star. All of this feels like it only happens to help move the plot.

Ultimately, Brad finds a partial solution and tells us there will be many sequels.

Why? Just why?

So why did they make this film? I don’t know. This film adds nothing to the zombie genre, something which even the crappiest of knock-off zombies films on Chiller tries to do. This film doesn’t try to be definitive either, like the one BIG film you should see to understand the state of the genre. To the contrary, it feels narrow and shallow. It doesn’t try to be the best of a tired genre either. In fact, it feels very bland and typical, and it's packed with clichés. There isn’t even that moment that grabs you, where you know the director was telling everyone: “This will be my signature moment which everyone will remember from this film!” So why make a film that adds nothing, does nothing special, doesn’t seem to have any special goal or voice, and doesn’t even have the one moment you know the director had been dying to jam into one of their films.

Money. Brad Pitt sells and "World War Z" was a milkable property. That’s all I can say.

Let’s compare this to what could have been. Most zombie movies are most interesting in the beginning, when the chaos is fresh. But almost all of them rush through this. A film that took its time and really showed you how this virus appears, how it spreads, and how it eventually overtakes the human ability to contain it would be excellent. This is something The Stand does well, as does Lifeforce, but few others. Even Contagion ended up doing a poor job with this aspect, which was sadly the very purpose of that film.

And to make this work in an interesting way, this time, people need to know these are zombies. If this stuff starts small, there is time for people to learn what they are up against, and still show them being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. This film doesn’t do that. It just says “commercial airlines were the perfect way to spread the disease,” and then it presents a scenario under which that can’t work – infection spreading in 12 seconds. Even worse, when the zombies strike in New York, no one except Pitt seems to have the slightest idea what is going on or even that they are facing something dangerous even though the world outside the US has already been destroyed. I guess New Yorkers live sheltered lives. And then, somehow, the city falls within seconds. Nonsense. Above all, zombie films need patience to present realistic time frames. This film had none... it needed it desperately.

This film also needed some other plot to maintain interest. Inject a love story. Have the main character save an orphanage or a zoo. Invent some counter-zombie. Do something other than run around gathering MacGuffins as you try to avoid zombies. Again, this film falls flat in that department. After making a big deal of Brad Pitt as some top investigator who can solve the zombie riddle, he gets sent to Korea for no valid reason. From that point forward, this film is just an action film without any logic to it.

Finally, give us a powerful ending. Either give us reason to believe the humans have won or give us something truly deep and dark. Give us something more than we already know: make the zombies conscious of who and what they are and what they have done – so far, no one has dared do that. Give us the idea of soul death as well as body death. Tell us this world isn’t actually our world, but it’s Hell, and we all face it. Those are endings that take bland zombie films to new levels. Alternatively, find a cure. Find the anti-zombie. Give us some moral or religious conduct that can save us all... give us a lesson to take away. Heck, give the zombies a hive brain, that would be new and interesting and more menacing. Don't just give us Brad Pitt in the lead.

These are the things any big budget modern zombie movie needs to do, but none of this happened here. All we got were a handful of hints at clever ideas from the book that were ignored in the film (in fact, there are websites dedicated to all the ideas in the book that got ignored here), then we got a pointless action film, and finally we got an ending that was sort of original but still underwhelmed.

This is sad, Brad. From a guy whose movies usually stand out as being smarter than everything else in the genre (e.g. Twelve Monkeys, Seven, Fight Club), this was a real disappointment.

Thoughts?