WORLD WAR Z (2013)

Studio:       Paramount Pictures
Director:    Marc Forster
Writer:       Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, Damon Lindelof
Producer:  Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Ian Bryce
Stars:     Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, David Morse, Fana Mokoena, David Andrews

Review Score: 

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Summary:

A former U.N. investigator must find the source of a deadly outbreak that has turned much of the global population into infectious zombies.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Ex-United Nations investigator Gerry Lane prepares for a routine day at home with his wife Karin and their two daughters. News reports on television and on radio begin to talk about the implementation of martial law and an outbreak of rabies that began in Taiwan. While the Lane family is caught in a major traffic jam, helicopters are heard overhead. Emergency vehicles race up the street as chaos begins to unfold. When a garbage truck acts as a battering ram to barrel through stopped cars, Gerry uses the newly opened path to drive away. The Lane’s vehicle is disabled in a collision. The Lanes escape on foot as Gerry witnesses dead people reanimating and biting others.

The family makes it to an RV and onto an open road as the city is overrun. Daughter Rachel suffers an asthma attack. Gerry takes a call from Thierry Umutoni of the United Nations. Thierry makes a plan to extract the Lane family as he needs Gerry’s help with the crisis. Armed with a rifle from the RV, the Lanes make it to a store in New Jersey. Gerry retrieves medicine for his daughter and rescues his wife from attackers while the market is looted.

With panic and violence escalating, the Lanes retreat to a nearby apartment building where they hole up with an Hispanic family. Gerry arranges for Thierry’s helicopter to retrieve them from the roof. The Hispanic family elects to stay in their home and to not escape with the Lanes, but the building is later breached. The Lanes are pursued by violent zombies as they make their way up the stairwell to the roof. The Hispanic family is among the newly undead, except for little boy Tommy who escapes with the Lanes when the helicopter team rescues them.

The Lanes are flown to an aircraft carrier where Karin, Tommy, and the two girls are given bunks. Gerry refuses Thierry’s proposal to help identify the source of the outbreak, but is forced to reconsider when told that his family would be displaced as non-essential personnel if he did not accept. Gerry and a SEAL Team are assigned to accompany Harvard virologist Dr. Andrew Fassbach to Camp Humphreys, a military outpost in South Korea. Fassbach believes that the outbreak was caused by a virus and they need to find Patient Zero in order to engineer a vaccine. Camp Humphreys was the source of an email that had the first use of the word “zombie.” Gerry gives his wife a satellite phone for daily contact and then says goodbye.

An AC-130 transport lands in the dark at the Camp Humphreys airstrip. When a swarm of zombies attacks the group in the dark, Fassbach panics and accidentally kills himself with his own weapon. Gerry and the remaining SEALs make it into the base and meet Captain Speke. Gerry asks about the email memo. Speke shows Gerry a room of incinerated corpses. 15 men were bit trying to cuff a man to a bed, who was identified as the first person there with the virus. The man was the base doctor sent to the field to verify the death of an AWOL soldier who then bit the doctor. Gerry realizes that the origin of the pathogen can be anywhere in the world. He also notices that a lame soldier was not bitten even though he was in a room full of zombies.

An ex-CIA agent is imprisoned in the base for selling guns to North Korea. His teeth are pulled out to avoid becoming a biter. The prisoner tells Gerry to see Mossad agent Jurgen Warmbrunn in Jerusalem. Israel built a wall before the outbreak began, suggesting prior knowledge of the virus. As Gerry and the soldiers return to the AC-130 for refueling, Karin calls on the satellite phone. The sound of the ring alerts the zombies. Captain Speke and other soldiers die in the ensuing attack, but Gerry makes it off the ground by co-piloting the aircraft.

In Jerusalem, a female soldier named Sergen escorts Gerry to Jurgen. Jurgen tells Gerry about “the tenth man” concept. After the Holocaust and the 1972 Olympics massacre, an agreement was made that if nine leaders dismissed an improbable warning, it would be the duty of the tenth man to disagree and to take action. Jurgen was the tenth man and a wall was built around the city after reports of Rakshasa, or “the undead,” in India.

Gerry plans to go to India next. When refugees begin singing over a loudspeaker for morale, the noise attracts zombies who climb over each other and then over the wall to breach the city’s defenses. Gerry scrambles for a plane as mayhem ensues. During the attack, Gerry notices that the zombies avoid an old man and an emaciated young boy. Segen is bitten suddenly. Acting quickly, Gerry grabs her knife and amputates the woman’s arm. Gerry and Segen make it to a Russian commercial airliner and escape.

Gerry calls Thierry with a theory and asks for the location of the nearest CDC or World Health Organization facility, which turns out to be in Cardiff, Wales. As the plane changes course to Wales, an outbreak begins in the rear of the plane. Passengers in the front cabin quietly build a barricade with their luggage. The zombies still break through. Gerry uses one of Segen’s grenades to blow a hole in the plane. The air pressure sucks out the zombies, but the plane crashes.

Segen and Gerry survive the crash, but Gerry is impaled with scrap metal from the plane. Segen and Gerry then travel on foot the rest of the way to the W.H.O. facility. With Gerry presumed dead in the plane crash, Karin and the children are removed from the aircraft carrier and sent to a refugee camp in Nova Scotia.

Gerry awakens to find his wound treated. Two of the W.H.O. doctors then question him. Gerry explains his theory that the virus looks for healthy hosts and avoids those who are terminally ill. To test his theory, he needs a curable terminal virus sample to inject into a healthy subject. The doctors explain that the samples are in B wing, which is overrun with 80 doctors and scientists who were turned.

Gerry, Segen, and one of the doctors plan to make a quiet run across the skybridge to Vault 139 where the samples are stored. When the group attracts a zombie horde, Gerry runs in a different direction as a distraction so that Segen and the doctor can make it to the vault. Unfortunately, Segen and the doctor are overrun and they retreat back to the main building. Gerry finds another way into the vault, but he is trapped inside by a zombie waiting at the door. Gerry decides to inject himself with a deadly virus to test his theory and as his only means of escape. The plan works and Gerry walks past all of the zombies and back to the main building.

Gerry reunites with his family in Nova Scotia. The camouflage vaccine now allows humans to fight, but the war is not over.

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Review:

Mainstream Hollywood boards the zombie entertainment bandwagon and gravy train with a big studio release of a big budget epic based on a big best-selling novel with a big box office draw.  That is a lot of bigs, and “World War Z” is exactly that: a big, globe-spanning adventure chock full of all the spectacle one would expect from a film with a $200 million price tag.

Cut from a structure typical for a mass appeal summertime blockbuster, “World War Z” opens on former U.N. investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), his wife (Mireille Enos), and his two daughters.  Theirs is the type of happy family that exists only in the movies.  They play games together when stuck in traffic and liberally dole out hugs while waiting to share breakfast.  Meanwhile, choppers begin to fly overhead while news reports start squawking buzzwords like “outbreak” and “martial law.”

When the zombie epidemic explodes, it takes the entire world with it in only a matter of minutes.  Every city and every continent is overrun simultaneously, and the populace immediately resorts to looting, violence, and panic.  The breakdown of society happens so conveniently fast and to such an extreme that looking the other way is required to move past the disbelief.  At least the story does not waste any time in establishing the world that zombie fiction fans know would likely exist at some point anyway.

If the world has any hope for long-term survival, Patient Zero must be located so that the virus’ origin can be traced and a vaccine created.  Just as Patient Zero is the singular person that started this ordeal in the first place, there also happens to be a Hero Zero.  He is the only man out of six billion on the planet capable of saving the human race.  That man: Brad Pitt.

Technically, that one man was supposed to be Harvard virologist Dr. Fassbach, who the U.N. identified as their best hope for solving the crisis.  Pitt is called out of retirement to accompany a SEAL team escort for the good doctor to South Korea, where the virus may have originated.  With literally the entire world at stake, the United Nations is really putting all of its eggs in one basket by sending a team of people that can be counted on one hand to carry the fate of humanity.  Is there really only one doctor and one U.N. investigator on Earth capable of combating the zombie plague?

Things do not go according to plan, and soon, Pitt is left to trot the planet in a journey that takes him through Korea, Israel, Wales, Nova Scotia, and New Jersey.  “World War Z’ nabs two birds with one stone by delivering varied locations for an ambitious story as well as a multicultural cast of characters that should be attractive in foreign markets.

Pitt at times flashes a personality while most other times his character is clinically matter-of-fact.  He has a precise manner of speaking that is presumably deliberate, although it is robotically monotone.  His style of digging out exposition is to speak a noun and then to ask a question.

“The noise.  Are they drawn to it?”

“This colonel.  Is he around?

“The guy who’s shackled.  Do you know … what bit him?”

“The soldier.  Do you know where he came from?”

In between zombie attacks, Pitt takes brief moments to reconnect with his wife via satellite phone in a subplot that loses its flavor quicker than a stick of Fruit Stripe chewing gum.  After spending the first half hour with them, the U.N. investigator is separated from his wife and children with 75% of the runtime remaining in the movie.  As the story unfolds, everything else going on is far more interesting and the script knows it, struggling for moments to remind the audience that Pitt’s character is a husband and a father.  Media reports have made “World War Z” notorious for its rewrites and reshoots.  You might think that someone would have attempted to rectify the disconnect with the family man storyline.  Instead, the filmmakers chucked it and chose to concentrate on the more action-oriented aspects of the plot.

Which was perhaps for the better.  For all the by-the-book Hollywood conventions that “World War Z” sleepwalks through, such as character archetypes and narrative formula, noteworthy ideas are presented as well.  “World War Z” is not all derivative.

Particularly fascinating is the Harvard virologist’s labeling of Mother Nature as a serial killer.  As deadly as she is creative, she is similar to other sociopaths in that she cannot help the urge to get caught so that she can be admired for her crimes.  That is why the doctor is so sure that a vaccine can be found.  It is equally interesting that the zombies in “World War Z” are not motivated by the usual desire to consume flesh.  More hive minded, these zombies are a virus that only wants to infect and consume any healthy living host.  That is a different approach to how zombies are typically viewed as a horror film monster.

The zombies of “World War Z” also have their own unique look.  Characterized by their distinct throat snarls and violent twitches, their chattering teeth and blind eyes set them apart from the undead of other films.  Though these creatures deliberately do not have individual identities.  These zombies are meant to be seen as a teeming mass that threatens infection rather than as singular threats, although they can be that too.

“World War Z” is rare in that it oddly calls attention to the fact that it is rated PG-13.  Personally, I am not in favor of gore for gore’s sake, but some scenes are cut in a way where the lack of onscreen violence is jarringly noticeable.  Amputating an infected arm, a scene from numerous other zombie films, is conspicuously missing shots of the blade slice, bloodletting, and exposed limb stump.  I applaud the aim for a lower MPAA rating to make the film more accessible.  Yet I cannot help feeling as though parts of the film and some of its emotion were left on the cutting room floor in an effort to keep blood off the screen.  Perhaps an unrated home video release will change how these types of sequences play.

“World War Z” still makes the most of its setpieces.  Action scenes that include an undead horde bringing down a helicopter and causing a plane to crash supply the fireworks that audiences expect from a mid-year theatrical release.  And as seen in some of the posters and trailers, the reanimated corpses improbably, if not impossibly, climbing over each to breach a massive wall make for an iconic visual from the film.

The story can drag while Pitt’s family is handled on an aircraft carrier, and there are contrived moments that will elicit either a sigh or a yawn.  However, “World War Z” is entertaining as more than a loud and fiery “watered-down for the masses” horror film.  Indeed, there are moments in “World War Z” that are memorable, and they ultimately prevent the film from becoming a big studio and big budget disappointment.

Review Score:  75

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