Directed by: Marc Forster
Starring: Brad Pitt, Daniella Kertesz, Mireille Enos
Rated PG-13, 116 minutes
Brad Pitt in a scene from “World War Z.” (Courtesy photo)
“World War Z” is a lot of things all at once. It’s a shameless action flick that capitalizes on our obsession with zombie movies, but it also avoids being just another zombie movie. It’s militaristic in its handling of the zombie threat, but the human element isn’t a throwaway. It’s wild and unruly, but it’s also sensible. I’m left wondering if what I’ve seen is a smart thriller or a vapid blockbuster; really, it’s both.
Loosely based on the novel of the same name, “World War Z” presents a world suddenly under attack by a zombie virus that turns its victims from the living to the living dead in mere seconds. Former UN operative Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt, “Moneyball”) is out with his wife Karin (Mireille Enos, TV’s “The Killing”) and their two young daughters when the outbreak hits their home city of Philadelphia. Within mere moments, the city is practically destroyed and its populace becomes a flesh-hungry mob. The Lanes manage to escape, hitching a helicopter ride to a refugee ship off the eastern coast, where they learn that what happened to Philadelphia has happened virtually everywhere else in the world as well.
Gerry, with his previous experience in areas of political chaos, is recruited to go back into harm’s way to try to figure out what the virus is and how it can be stopped. What ensues is a global game of hopscotch, with Gerry traveling from one safe haven to another, from South Korea to Israel to Wales and beyond. But no base he visits, no matter how fortified, is impervious to the vicious outbreak for very long. Gerry, along with Segen (Israeli actress Daniella Kertesz), a soldier he meets along the way, is going to have to find a way to stop the virus’s spreading before it catches up with him.
More than anything else, the story plays out like a medical mystery, and while it might not be a very rigorously scientific one, it certainly has more of a logical train of thought behind it than most zombie movies. This works much to the movie’s benefit; nothing separates a zombie movie from the rest of the crowd quite like characters whose first instinct upon seeing zombies isn’t always to shoot wildly.
Marc Forster (“Quantum of Solace”) deftly manages a script that jumps all over the world, avoiding melodramatic shock and sentimentality. The expansive action sequences come in a tremendous variety of types, and Forster proves more than adequate to helm each one of them, even if the camerawork, in its shakiness, sometimes robs us of a clear view.
Forster’s other main success lies in getting an ensemble of decent actors in flat roles to play their parts without feeling like stereotypes. Gerry’s family, the archetypal dead weight that needlessly complicates many action movies, seems to acknowledge its uselessness. Enos’s Karin does nothing, and asks nothing in return. Gerry, our hero, the one we’d expect to get patriotic and emotional when we want him to act, is exactly as decisive and unsentimental as he needs to be. And he pairs up with the stone-faced Daniella Kertesz, whose portrayal of Segen is quiet but just as strong as that of anyone else in the movie. This is not a movie you see for the performances, but there’s no overblown earnestness to laugh at.
Of course, the movie’s been almost overshadowed by the troublesome saga of its making. Brad Pitt, also a producer on the film, had an infamously difficult time getting the movie made. At this point, its greatest success, beyond the fact that the finished product is a coherent and exciting story, is that a finished product was ever released at all. Even Max Brooks, the author of the novel on which the movie is based, has publicly disowned the film, claiming the only thing it shares in common with his book is a title.
So what do we make of the movie that we did end up getting? Is it just another crummy summer cash cow, or is it deeper than that? One could infer that the movie is a metaphor for something larger—maybe the movie industry itself, which faces an impending implosion. It’s almost too silly that we could learn such a lesson, or any lesson, for that matter, from zombies. But someday, looking retrospectively at “World War Z,” we might find that was the case.
Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
