World War Z Review: "Look, It's Brad Pitt."

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Having just finished the stunning second season of The Walking Dead, I was pretty excited for World War Z, which promised to be what I wish The Walking Dead had a little more of: the beginnings of a zombie apocalypse.

The Plot. 

The movie starts out with Brad Pitt playing some guy. He has a family and they make breakfast and get in their car. Then fast zombies attack. Then Brad Pitt is apparently the only one who can stop the zombies, and he travels all over the world fighting them.

This scene could have been dramatic and exciting.
But nope, it lasted maybe 30 seconds and was terribly directed. 

The Review. 

That's probably the shortest movie description I've written. This movie is ridiculously short. It doesn't even hit two hours. Ideally, this story would be spread out over 6, maybe 10 hours on HBO or AMC. Instead we get a stupidly fast paced, sort of boring almost two hour movie.

As someone over at HitFix said, the movie could have just gone the way of This is the End and had Brad Pitt play himself because there is absolutely no character building at all.

The main character has no characteristics beyond being Brad Pitt, and he is basically the only character consistently appearing in the film.

That fact makes you not fear for his life at all. Not once during the movie was I worried he would die.

This is in stark contrast to The Walking Dead where its unusual when four episodes go by without a major character death.

The two hour length ruins everything that is good about this movie. There is no sense of normal life bing disrupted by the zombie apocalypse because everything is normal for like 5 seconds.

Then when Brad Pitt and family are safe, we learn that, for some reason, Brad Pitt is the right guy to send in to help find out how this thing started. No mention of why he's the guy, he just is.

At this point in the film, basically every major US city, and several cities around the world, have been completely destroyed. The President is dead, the VP is missing, and Washington is dark. Not once does anyone question what is happening. No one wonders why people are turing into brain dead evil monster things.

Automatically, everyone just knows that they're zombies, even though they don't really meet my definition of zombie. The "zombies" we get to see be created don't even seem to die, they just go straight from human to fast zombie.

But everyone just knows that it's the "undead."

The movie is stupidly fast paced and plays out like a video game. Brad Pitt goes somewhere. People die and he runs away from "zombies"  He finds a small clue after outrunning lots of "zombies"  then outruns more "zombies" as more people die to get to his transportation. This transportation allows him to go somewhere else, where he gets to outrun more "zombies" and see more people die.

Also there's tons of really subtle hints about the "zombies" weakness along the way.

There starts to be a cool story forming at every place he goes, but then "Nope, gotta run from these zombies. I'm Brad Pitt." There were several really interesting plots sort of mentioned throughout, mainly in Israel or wherever (I don't even care because he was there for 4 seconds), but they just gloss over the ideas and get to more action sequences.

There are so many action sequences that are so similar that after a while you just don't care anymore. You're not scared, creeped out, thrilled, or even remotely excited. You're watching Brad Pitt play an okay video game where he has to run, jump, and dodge.

At first I thought the whole fast zombie thing would be a bit stupid, but it actually isn't. What is stupid is the movie's directing, which makes the masses of fast zombies somehow less creepy and intimidating than three slow zombies in The Walking Dead. The final action sequence had the potential to be thrilling, but wasn't at all. 

The movie's ending was awkward too. It wasn't a bad ending at all, it was actually pretty good, but the way it was shown was just weird and it really felt like the creators ran out of ideas, time, and money.

The movie isn't horrible however, it's just not good. I could stumble around looking for the right word, saying it's not bad, but not great. Not fantastic, but not suckish. Instead, I'll just say it's okay.

The one scene I did like lasted about 15 seconds. It had to do with a stupidly small group of people walking out of a plan into the creepiest blue/black rain, knowing that "zombies" are out there.
But then, of course, the scene quickly turned to crap and then ended with the funniest, most stupid character death I've seen since The Core. 

A quick note on the book World War Z. I haven't actually read the book, but sources say that this movie is nothing like the book at all. There is almost nothing in common. Burnie Burns (the sexiest man at Rooster Teeth) said that he would suggest seeing the movie before reading the book, if you plan on experiencing both. And we can all trust Burnie.

Also, fans of The Killing will  be very happy to see Mireille Enos can still show off her two acting modes: happy face and sad face.

The Bottomline. 

I can not really recommend this movie. If you have absolutly nothing better to do with your time, go ahead and see it. But I urge you to check Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, your DVD collection, every cable channel, your closet, under your bed, and even Vudu (just kidding, Vudu sucks) before paying money to watch this.
It tries to be scary but isn't, tries to develop characters but fails complexity, and sucks at telling the story it's trying to tell. 

5.5/10