World War Z (2013)

As recently as ten years ago it would have been completely unheard of to make a mega-budget zombie blockbuster starring a Hollywood A-lister, and I’d wager that no studio would even have considered it if presented with a script. Zombie films used to be a bit of a niche category within the horror genre, albeit one with a ravenous cult following of fans, but it could never have been called mainstream. The point in which I believe we started to see a change was with the introduction of 28 Days Later, and the brilliant ‘ZomRomCom’ Shaun of the Dead, which both gained extraordinary popularity with budgets as low as £8m and £4m respectively. This new-found love for zombies was highlighted by the later successes of Zombieland and the hit TV series The Walking Dead. This brings us to 2013, where zombies had become the new vampires, and where a $190m undead blockbuster has been greenlit and unleashed in the form of World War Z. To put that massive figure into perspective, it is the joint 32nd most expensive film ever made, placing higher than The Dark Knight, and costing approximately 1,650 times more than Night of the Living Dead.

World War Z is loosely based (and I mean very loosely) on the book of the same name by Max Brooks. However, after rewrites that completely changed the script, Brooks has claimed that the only thing the two entities have in common is the title, and he has a point. The film plot bears no resemblance to that of the book, and the zombies do not follow many of the traits set out in the canon of the novel. This is not to say that it is a bad film. It is just not the film that the author envisioned when he sold the rights to Paramount.

The film focuses on former UN investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), who is tasked with the daunting challenge of travelling the world to find a possible weakness that could be exploited to prevent the undead plague from wiping out the remains of humanity. The globetrotting nature of the plot may actually be one of the strongest attributes of the film. This is because it lends a tremendous feeling of scale to the story; showing the devastation that has been caused across the world. It is a fresh change of pace from the standard zombie movie outline of ‘find a secure building; try to hold out in secure building; secure building inevitably gets overrun’, and the fact that there is a selfless ultimate goal other than survival allows for a greater presence of tension, thanks to the potential impact of the protagonist’s failure.

The aspect of the film that stood out most for me, as a contrast to the majority of zombie films, was the speed of the afflicted undead. In the world of horror film fandom there are many ‘zombie purists’ who believe that the living dead should always walk, amble or lurch along on their decomposing limbs, and never run; these purists would froth at the mouth at the agility of the creatures in World War Z. The reanimated corpses are definitely not ‘walkers’, or even ‘runners’ … they are the sprinting dead: a direct cross between the ‘infected’ from 28 Days Later and the velociraptors from Jurassic Park. They can clear one hundred metres in ten seconds flat, hurdle a car and then pounce 15 feet through the air to execute a precision tackle that would elicit a “clever girl” from even the most experienced hunter. While some may argue that faster predators equals a higher threat, therefore a scarier threat – I have to disagree. There is something innately unnerving about the jolting lurch of a traditional zombie that loses its effect when they sprint like athletes. In World War Z, the “Zekes”, as they are referred to by the military, are at their most frightening when they are standing dormant with nothing to chase. It is only then that you can appreciate the grotesque twitching and spasming that the infection causes, and it is during one of these moments that the film delivers one of its only genuinely scary scenes.

Rating: 

Certificate: 15
Director: Marc Forster
Starring: Brad Pitt
Running Time: 116 mins