World War Z

Go back six months and the omens for Marc Foster and Brad Pitt’s zombie project (he stars and co-produces) were pretty appalling: production and editing had been riddled with writing fallouts and cost issues (the budget ballooned to around $200m, though there were hyperbolic reports of the ridiculous sum of $400m) to the hilarity of all outside that poisonous bubble – Foster and Pitt reportedly didn’t speak to each other at its troubled end. Fast forward to its release and there were accusations from Israeli quarters that the movie had undertones of anti-Zionism. With all the problems that WWZ has been plagued by, the end result could have been a lot worse.

The first script was penned by J. Michael Straczynski (Changeling) before Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom) was parachuted in to compose a complete re-write. Then, after the shoot finally completed last year, Pitt and his team decided (with the help of Lost and Star Trek Into Darkness’s Damon Lindelof) that the entire forty minute third act would need to be reshot and replaced. There severe problems with logistics and an inexperienced production team… to be honest WWZ’s travails are best described in this article here. Everyone expected a flop of Titanic proportions. And then, on the first weekend, it took £77.3m ($118.8m) from the box office. It had more than recouped its outlay and there is even, absurdly, concrete talk of a sequel.

Pitt plays the former UN official Gerry who has retired in order to spend more time with his stereotypically idyllic family. But one day they, and all the inhabitants of a Philadelphia traffic jam, are accosted by a horde of hyper athletic zombies (that is, Danny Boyle zombies rather George Romero zombies. With the help of his friend at the UN (Fana Mokoena) Gerry and his fam just escape from Newark by helicopter and are taken to a Navy ship somewhere in the Atlantic off the Eastern seaboard. From there he is persuaded to help a young virologist discover the source of the zombie disease and find a cure. Gerry finds himself travelling to South Korea and Israel and Wales in that quest.

As one would expect the plot does lose itself and there are a series of false starts and pointless characters but nothing too laughable. The third act is tangibly different to the rest but it isn’t noticeably worse – in fact the discovery at the end is surprisingly adroit and an appearance by Peter Capaldi is always welcome. To be fair though, considering the writing issues, there must have been a late night where everyone just said ‘oh fuck it, that’ll do’. It is a bit funny how serious it takes itself though – ‘the fate of humanity is at stake!’ etc etc.

Older zombie movies were typically issued with savage contemporaneous social commentaries, trying to act as intellectual stimulus rather than the simple blood’n’gore fests that latter days renditions have become. The modern genre is rarely anything more than shallow grisly escapism; celebrating man’s ability to create vulgar fiction rather than forcing the audience to question the world. The concept of the zombie apocalypse is a utopian construct, fashioned by writers as a kind of reset button for society – to wilfully neglect or ignorantly overlook that makes a mockery of the whole thing. WWZ can be accused of that. It possesses nothing of the intricacies and complexities that the book possesses. Of course it would pertinent to point out that the original script (Straczynski) had serious geopolitical intentions but it was rejected, ostensibly for being too clever. Not unlike the rebuff of Soderbergh’s Behind The Candelabra the production companies again prove to be overly fearful of commissioning anything that doesn’t use a requisite amount of CGI. But, to be fair to them, they’re only following demand. And the current demand is for pot-bellied superhero with unquenchable appetites for computer effects.

Hollywood once again smothers any spark of intelligent thought with the pillow of ‘action-thriller’ and VFX. World War Z is a blueprint of how bountiful CGI and a first class A-lister like Pitt can draw hordes of convulsing people and make tons of money despite artistic deficiencies, and how it will be able to achieve that feat over and over. It’s mind-numbing entertainment but I guess its entertainment nonetheless. And we all have those late nights when all we want to do is watch something guileless and anaesthetising. This is it.