Director – Matt Forster
Writer(s) – Matthew Michael, Carnahan, Drew Goddard, Damon Lindelof
Starring – Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Hale, Matthew Fox
I’ve always been of the belief that a good zombie film requires careful planning and a decent underlying metaphor in order to be worth a damn. So, it was with a sense of foreboding and a lack of enthusiasm that I sat down to try World War Z, the troubled production, based on the critically acclaimed novel of the same name, that went through several re-writes and featured an ever increasingly bloated budget. Unfortunately, the troubled production is very noticeable, leading to a film that feels disjointed and confused.
The narrative is so ridiculously simple, that it can be summarised in a mere two sentences. Brad Pitt is retired United Nations investigator Gerry Lane, a family man who loves his family. Did I mention he loves his family? Good, that’s important, because it’s effectively his entire characterisation. When the world suffers a global outbreak of a zombie virus, Lane is forced to leave his family in the hands of his former employers, while he sets out to discover the mythical ‘Patient Zero’ and bring an end to the carnage.
The rest of the ‘narrative’ consists to merely get Pitt from set-piece to set-piece, as the violence and chaos reaches absolutely ridiculous levels of stupidity. We get plane crashes, we get zombie massacres, we even get a pile of zombies using each other as a human ladder to break into Jerusalem. Yes, I just typed that sentence. No, it’s nowhere near as cool as it sounds. Considering four writers are credited on this project, you’d think we could get a narrative that could sustain the two hour runtime. Sadly, we don’t, and to say it’s threadbare would be an understatement.
The worst part is that the narrative tries it’s best to paint itself out as cerebral and intelligent, when sadly, it’s simply daft. The dialogue is also absolutely abysmal. Every single word serves as a plot device as opposed to any character build or development. Exchanges such as the following reiterate my point;
- ‘He’s going to inject himself!’
- ‘We don’t even know which ones will work’
- ‘If he goes for the left side, he’s dead anyway’
It’s the kind of dialogue that South Park has built a legacy on mocking, and how not one of the four writers noticed the awfulness of this expositional tripe is beyond my comprehension. The problem lies in insulting our intelligence. This is dialogue that no human being would ever likely come out with, rather, it’s designed to talk to us, the audience, directly. Of course, doing so gives the impression that the writer assumed we’re far too stupid to figure this out ourselves. Honestly, it’s borderline insulting.
Pitt’s character is also the only one we spend enough time with to justify a character arc, and we don’t even get one for him. We know from the opening scenes that he’s a man who loves his family, and has immaculate hair. Two hours later? He’s a man who loves his family, seems to be indestructible, and still has immaculate hair. There is no arc, it simply doesn’t exist. Pitt’s performance encapsulates this perfectly, as he delivers dialogue with all the emotional impact and believability of a sausage roll. A sausage roll with fantastic locks.
This could, of course, be excusable, should the spectacle aspect hold up. Clearly, this was a ‘lowest common denominator movie’, designed to appeal to a mass audience. So, with $190 million pushed behind it, you’d expect some fantastic effects at the very least? Unfortunately, we don’t. The effects are on-par with a Horror Channel Special, the cinematography is naff, and the whole thing at times looks like a Gamecube cut-scene, as opposed to a motion picture.
If I have a single positive thing to say, it’s that there is a sequence towards the end that is actually very atmospheric and interesting. It’s gripping, to say the least. Problem is, it was added on after the rest of the film was shot, replacing the original ending, and as such looking and feeling like an entirely different movie. Most frustratingly, that other movie looks and feels a lot better than what we got. So we get an hour and a half of garbage, only for the director/writers to tease us with a potentially much better film that we could have been seeing, towards the end. Somehow, it feels even worse.
World War Z, it’s safe to say, is an incoherent mess that sadly could, and should, have been a lot better. Featuring shoddy CGI, an awful script and the most boring performance of Brad Pitt’s career, it never does remotely enough to justify it’s budget and run-time. Still, Pitt’s hair is fantastic, and the film is worth watching for no other reason than to see the hair still remain pristine, no matter what hell it goes through. So there’s that, I guess.
Final Rating – 2.5
Joshua Moulinie
pinealdreamsblog 