World War Z – Movie Review

by | Jun 28, 2013 | Reviews

Max Brooks’s wildly successful and for some, beloved, novel World War Z had its share of battles to overcome before gracing the big screen. Plagued with problems such as being over budget, supposed lack of vision of the director, and requiring (sometimes) extensive rewrites and reshoots, it is a wonder that the film ever finished production and made it into theaters. Directed by Marc Foster and starring Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos (best known for AMC’s The Killing), World War Z is, at least in the opinion of this reviewer, actually quite good. However, given the departures that the film takes from the events in the novel, a rabid fan of the book may not share the same opinion. While it is unnecessary to go into great detail about the differences between novel and film in a film review, I will briefly describe one glaring departure: whereas the novel features various fictionalized narrative accounts of people involved in or eyewitness to events of World War Z from all over the globe, the film focuses mainly on Gerry Lane (played by Pitt), a former UN employee and his family. Lane and his family are in New York City and flee to Newark, New Jersey to try to escape the rash of zombie attacks, which turn victims into zombies within a matter of minutes. Airlifted to safety and placed on a warship by a former colleague, Pitt is forced back into his former lifestyle in order to allow his family refuge. Trying to find the zombie pandemic’s patient zero, Pitt eventually succeeds in finding a cure, though not a flawless one.

The movie itself is rather visually stunning, taking the viewer to many corners of the globe. The film also showcases its share of action and CGI (a scene featuring a destructive plane ride borders on the implausible, but in the end, it seems to fit). And while the characterizations associated with the zombie apocalypse in World War Z are certainly not on a par with those portrayed in The Walking Dead, the film nevertheless manages to move the viewer on some emotional levels. Furthermore, Pitt, at least to this reviewer, has not been cast in a really great career-defining role since his string of films in the early 1990s, which included A River Runs Through It, Legends of the Fall, California and Seven (sorry Fight Club fanatics, but I am not a fan), but World War Z gives him just that, and already they are talking about a sequel. The bottom line: if you walk into the theater expecting to see a visual translation of Max Brooks’s novel, you will be disappointed. If you walk into the theater as an escape and/or to avoid the summer heat, then World War Z may just be a great choice for you.