![]() ![]() Alas, a much-publicised disastrous production and spiralling costs have given the film a huge mountain to climb before it's released. Pitt should be a big enough draw for audiences. Zombies are the 'in thing' when it comes to onscreen monsters. Starring Hollywood A-lister Brad Pitt, at first glance it would seem like the studio should have a sure-fire hit on their hands. I wish I felt passionately about this movie one way or the other, but that’s another thing Hollywood big budget movie-making aims for these days: movies that inspire neither love nor hate, that go in one eye and out the other, bypassing the brain entirely.IN just over three weeks the film adaptation of Max Brooks' much-loved novel World War Z is released around the globe. WWZ fails to imitate this style in any but the most glancing fashion, just enough to make you think, wow, they sure aren’t accomplishing what they think they are.Īnd so on and so forth. Puzzle building in this way is a very specific skill not possessed by many writers. The stories come together only when these fragments are added together. Tony Gilroy, writer of the Bourne movies, as well as Michael Clayton, The Devil’s Advocate and others, has a very specific style in which scenes exist as fragments, their beginnings and endings cut off, with information doled out in tiny pieces. Clearly they wanted to create a Bourne kind of vibe, but that’s not as easy as it looks. That they cobbled together an almost coherent movie is impressive enough, I suppose. Hint to my neighbor: if you’re watching a zombie movie, and a dog is barking at a closed bathroom door, and the door is rattling, and moaning noises are coming from behind it-there is a zombie in that bathroom, and he’s going to jump out–wait for it– now. I couldn’t stop laughing, much to the consternation of my neighbor, whose geniune surprise when the zombie burst out of the airplane bathroom left me wondering whether humanity is worth saving after all. The second act features Pitt flying to various cities just in time to watch the zombies take over. Everything plot-wise in the movie makes exactly this much sense. Instead they blackmail him into helping by threatening to dump his family off the aircraft carrier. No one bothers to point out to him that the WHOLE WORLD IS DYING. Despite the rescue, Pitt refuses to help save the world because, you know, he quit that whole U.N. Next he calls in a rescue helicopter to whisk them away to an aircraft carrier. The first act is reasonably exciting while retaining a certain feeling of bland predictability, as Pitt miraculously drives out of Pittsburgh with his family while every other human in the city is gridlocked zombie fodder. “There’s no food left, but I found this little girl. All of WWZ feels like a Frankenstein flick, like they were re-writing it every day of the shoot, and once wrapped found themselves pasting the thing together out of parts never meant to be joined. Who would care? Am I right? Give that man a couple of cute kids! Hell, give one of them asthma! A cane! A third arm growing out of her head! Anything! Human extinction is not enough-we need something to care about!īack to the third act: not surprisingly, it belongs in another movie. I mean just imagine a movie where a world-wide outbreak of zombie-itis threatens all of humanity, and the one man tasked with saving us is-I shudder to write it down- single. The original ending apparently featured a giant zombie battle sequence in Red Square that made Brad Pitt not appear as charming a family man as he did at the film’s start.īecause if you’re like me, you know that zombie movies are only interesting when nice family men do nice things to save the nice people. The third act, by the way, was added after the movie was already shot. Take that axe to the wall, you can escape this movie I want to see fights over the most delicious intestines. When I see zombies, I want to see flesh eaten off of bones. Zombies are fun for the whole family now! Even when soldiers toss grenades into a heap of squirming undead, they blow up with nary a drop of blood. These zombies want to bite you and move on, thus earning themselves a PG-13 rating. They’re essentially just jerky CGI blobs, millions of them, all herky-jerking their way around, biting people, and moving on. The zombies run so fast you can’t even get a look at them. ![]() ![]() ![]() In World War Z, the latest late-to-the-party zombie flick, starring Brad Pitt as the best U.N.-guy-who-does-things guy the world has ever known, the zombies have been denuded of everything that makes zombies scary, aside from sheer numbers. ![]()
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