World War Z has had a troubled production: the book it's based on - which follows dozens of different characters giving surprisingly moving accounts about their attempts to survive a zombie apocalypse - has been so heavily streamlined that we follow just one character: and it's one that doesn't actually exist in the book; the ending was completely reshot after test screenings went... not well; and the trailers had bad CGI and a dearth of story. So it's surprising to find the film's kinda/almost/mostly okay.
It's well directed and moves at pace, diving straight into the story. The ropey effects have been tidied up. The plot is decent enough, following - like the book - attempts to trace the infection back to its source, and in so doing, find a cure. The zombies (or 'ish-zombies as they don't eat flesh, they just pass on the infection) are scary, with unsettling jerky movements reminiscent of the Japanese horror films from a decade ago. They're fast zombies, which ruins the metaphor of them as death: slow but inevitable. On the bright side speed does make them a more credible threat.
The problem with the film, and it's not the one I was expecting, is that Brad Pitt is cast as 'The Everyman', a Harrison Ford/Jimmy Stewart-type. Which is fine when you cast ever-haggard Ford, but not so much when you cast the first man to advertise Chanel n.5. (That he's working the exact same look from that ad doesn't help. I kept expecting him to turn to camera and whisper pseudo-poetic nonsense.) Pitt is an okay actor, but he's neither charismatic nor funny; directors have long been in the habit of pairing him up with actors that are, and can hide Pitt's lack thereof (see: Tom Cruise in 'Interview with a Vampire', Morgan Freeman in 'Seven' and even Angelina Jolie in 'Mr & Mrs Smith'). In World War Z he's all on his own, most of the cast are either completely forgettable or will obviously be dead four to five minutes after we meet them. Tasked with carrying the film, Pitt never out and out fails, thanks to the films pace, but a bland lead is almost worse than a bad lead.
Overall: 6/10
SPOILERS!:
(Highlight to read)
Despite (or because of) a huge rewrite, the ending makes very little sense. Pitt infects himself with a terminal disease, is ignored by the zombies because they need healthy hosts, then cures himself when he's out of danger. Does he have to keep infecting himself with different diseases when he goes out for milk, or, despite being cured, do they keep seeing him as an unhealthy host? Also: wouldn't someone have noticed that the zombies don't go near hospices or, one would imagine, a fair proportion of the elderly? The way Pitt works it out is also problematic. He sees three different people being avoided, all of them very different (a soldier with a dodgy leg, an old-ish man, and a boy with no hair - the last of which he was looking at from a quarter of a mile away) and concludes: "They're all suffering from terminal illness! I know it because that's what my gut tells me! That and the rewrite we spent all of 10-minutes hashing out."
MINOR NOTE: In the W.H.O. scenes we see the same corridors over and over (a la early Doctor Who), when it wouldn't make geographical sense. Which means one of two things: 1) They were shooting on a teeny tiny budget and were dressing up the same corridor as different corridors with the cunning use of numbers, or 2) The editor messed up.
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