World War Z (2013)

Something tells me I’ve seen this movie before. See if it sounds familiar to you. A man and his family are eating breakfast and there are people running around all crazy on the TV, but the family doesn’t pay much attention. Then they go outside and everyone starts running around all crazy. Apparently the world is ending because of a virus that is making people die and then come back to life. The father in the family used to work for the government and he agrees to try and find out what caused the virus in the first place in exchange for his family’s safety. He goes to one place, doesn’t find any answers and goes to another place where he doesn’t find any answers. After each new place he is chased by the undead and extras are killed left and right around him. When he finally does find at least a temporary answer, the movie ends.

There is clearly a market for end of the world movies, though I can’t imagine why. There is almost no way to make a good one, because what can possibly happen in the movie except the world ending? These things always focus on one individual fighting for survival, usually while suffering through numerous episodes of repeated peril. There is no room for character development or growth. There is no real plot to speak of and there isn’t really anything exciting or interesting to look at, because it always just repeats itself. These movies follow video game logic, in that their events would suit a one-player game more than they would a movie. There isn’t anything fun about watching your friend play a video game, yet people convince themselves that these movies are entertaining, despite just being video games on autopilot.

In World War Z, Brad Pitt stars as “Hero Man,” one of the dullest of cinematic conventions and further proof of my video game argument. He is a man with literally no personality, a character meant to act as an Energizer Bunny. He just keeps going even when there’s nowhere to go. His family is only present at the beginning as a slight motive for being thrown into the wild goose chase that makes up most of the movie. I suppose it’s supposed to be ironic that the family loses their safety privileges pretty much as soon as he leaves. I don’t think there’s any non-action scene that makes sense or has purpose. For example, a character is introduced who is a young genius doctor who’s going to “save us all.” He meets the Pitt character, makes a ridiculous speech that adds nothing to the movie and sounds rather rehearsed, and then he dies. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why he was introduced in the first place.

There are numerous other scenes that display terribly immature writing. In one, the Pitt character gets zombie blood in his mouth, counts to eight and sighs with relief. Just moments earlier, people were getting infected just for breathing the air, which makes the hero’s immunity rather baffling. I’m not complaining because he survives the incident, but because it was written at all. Things should happen in movies because they provide some sort of thrust. A plot should move to its next point, a character should learn something or at least the audience should, but there’s nothing like that in World War Z. Things happen because they look cool and that’s about it.

Then there’s the zombies. The undead in this film are referred to as such, but don’t fit any previous definition of the monster ever conceived. I’m not even sure some of the zombies ever died. Now, I understand that things like The Walking Dead have updated zombies to a more action-ready creature. It is no longer typical for zombies to be slack-jawed, brain-dead, staggering individuals calling out for brains. Now they can sprint at incredible speeds, climb buildings, open doors, file tax returns. In World War Z, the zombies are basically superhumans that can do whatever they darn well please. Some of them leap off buildings onto helicopters, others can form a human ladder to get over an enormous wall, others have the patience to hide for hours on an airplane before making their attack, and still others do just stagger around aimlessly. A couple of scientist characters briefly explain the difference between a zombie that is “dormant” and one that is not, though it doesn’t make much sense. This is obviously one heck of a virus, I’ll tell you what.

 Another random complexity of the infection is that it gives the undead a sixth sense about sick people who are not worthy of being eaten. This leads to the movie’s impossibly stupid conclusion, which was apparently made with the intention of creating a sequel based on the same book or another one in a series or something. I don’t think I’ll ever have the patience to sit through another one of these unless someone tells director Marc Forster that a zombie movie can’t work unless we either care about the victims or are at least scared of the zombies. World War Z is a depressing movie because somebody thought they had enough of a story to write this thing, somebody else actually thought that story would make a good movie and thousands of people are buying tickets thinking it’s worth watching. More depressing still is the likely fact that all movies will eventually de-evolve to this level and everyone’ll be too zombified to know any better.

3/10