“There is a danger of changing too much in the search for perfection.”
-- Agnetha Faltskog
-- Agnetha Faltskog
When it's all said and done, World War Z feels like a film that had two directors. This could be partially due to the film's troubled shooting with several weeks of reshoots and an entirely rewritten third act. Given the reported original ending, there was quite a tonal shift in the finished product. The first half, with its action feel, and fairly subpar CGI (given the film's budget), accomplishes what it sets out to do admirably, without really transcending into anything special. The second half is a much smaller-scale, more tense piece and makes the film memorable despite being, in some respects, more flawed than what preceded it. Brad Pitt, for reasons known only to Brad Pitt, decides to play his character, Gerry Lane, with long hair. It would seem, especially given his character's pit stop aboard a naval ship, that the hair would be the first thing to go before wading back into danger. Small, cosmetic complaints aside, Pitt does a decent job with the role without ever really deciding how he wants to play it, alternating between sympathetic family man and action hero from scene to scene. This is definitely Pitt's film, with no other actor really being asked to do much, and the film's global scale necessitating a rotating cast around him. |
Half of the appeal of a zombie movie is watching just how fast society crumbles, how quickly our population of billions can work against us in transmitting an infection, how quickly people will resort to barbarism to stay alive. On this front, the movie does not disappoint. When director Marc Forster is given cramped spaces to work with, the tension is fantastic. With human actors in make-up, and using camera tricks to make them appear inhuman, Forster is at his peak. The large, outdoor scenes where he resorts to CGI is where the film feels flimsy. The zombies move a little too fluidly; a little too unbound by gravity, and the result is to break the tension, subconsciously reminding you that what you're watching isn't real. The first act suffers from both genre trappings (zombies are never above our protagonists on a staircase, only ever below, chasing them upwards), and the effects of the constant rewrites (Matthew Fox plays an unnamed soldier with about 40 seconds of screen time in a role that was probably much beefier in an earlier draft).
With 4 writers eventually having input on the script, World War Z suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen. Even the names of two characters, Brad Pitt's Gerry and a U.N. staffer named Thierry probably read as more distinct in the book the film is based on, than they work when said aloud. It is ultimately a mess of a film, that is nevertheless enjoyable, and leaves hope for a possible, more coherent sequel.
With 4 writers eventually having input on the script, World War Z suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen. Even the names of two characters, Brad Pitt's Gerry and a U.N. staffer named Thierry probably read as more distinct in the book the film is based on, than they work when said aloud. It is ultimately a mess of a film, that is nevertheless enjoyable, and leaves hope for a possible, more coherent sequel.
A movie that surprisingly came out of extensive rewrites as an enjoyable, albeit deeply flawed film