So as anyone who follows the film industry knows, World War Z was supposed to be a trainwreck. Its budget spiraled out of control to $190 million, nearly totalling my pocket change, the script was heavily rewritten during filming, the star and the director weren't on speaking terms, a planned sequel was cancelled. It looked to be a cinematic failure of Pluto Nashian proportions.
And then the film came out, made $530 million, earned nearly two-thirds favorable reviews, has a sequel back in the works and was one of the few non-flops of a flop filled summer movie season. The world is truly an interesting place.
Dane Barbados Jr. has seen World War Z and while flawed (of course, as it was not written, directed, produced and acted by your humble narrator Dane Barbados Jr.) it was a thoroughly entertaining film.
As your American movie making industry is creatively bankrupt. much like most films being turned out, World War Z (WWZ) is based upon a novel of the same name, written by the spawn of legendary comedian Mel Brooks no less. Dane Barbados Jr. will not go into the details of the book or how the film deviates because he is well aware that the bulk of his readership is American and as such wouldn't open a book and read at gunpoint. Sufficed to say the two properties share little past the title.
That said one must respect a film that gets to the point within the first ten minutes. WWZ wastes no time getting into the action as zombies quickly, and literally, flood into Philadelphia whilst Former UN operative Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), his wife Karin (Mireille Enos) and their two daughters, Rachel and Constance attempt to navigate traffic. The first half of the film is a non-stop rollercoaster of action and set-pieces as Lane is coerced into helping to find the origins of the zombie plague. We follow Lane from location to location, meeting and leaving characters as he shuffles from place to place ending up in a walled-off and relatively safe Israel, who are one of the few countries to get their collective shit together. Characterization during this portion of the film is sacrificed for the cause, but it's well worth it in this author's opinion, and as this author is Dane Barbados Jr., his opinion is the only one that truly matters.
Once in Israel the pace of the film slows noticeably, but that too works as we're introduced to the stand out character of the film, an Israeli soldier (Daniella Kertesz) who goes only by "Segen" which means lieutenant. She's such a magnetic badass that she doesn't require a proper name.
Segen accompanies Lane to a World Health Organization facility in Cardiff, Whales where the film channels traditional zombie media with closer, more confined, sets, less of the undead and a much slower and more deliberate pace, for the film and the characters within, not unlike one of your survival horror video games.
WWZ is an interesting entry into the oversaturated zombie market. Its undead are much more animalistic, fast and agile, functioning much like a horde of ants or an invading virus. The undead of the film clutch and bunch together, forming "human" ladders out of heaps of zombies, uninterested in lingering over a meal as opposed to leaping, biting, and moving on, working to spread the plague above all other considerations. Dane Barbados Jr. also found it mildly refreshing that WWZ is a zombie property that takes place in a world where zombie properties exist. The creatures are openly referred to as zombies and the time honored virtues of shooting a zombie in the head is not treated as a grand revelation. Curiously zombie fluid is established as not being an infecting agent if ingested which leads to some questions as to the mechanics of how the virus spreads but those are questions that are beneath the purview of one such as I.
So, faithful readers, we have World War Z, the flop that defied all expectation by not being a flop at all. Dane Barbados Jr., your ever humble narrator, does not command that you see it, he will instead just think less of you if you don't.
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