Zombies are on the rampage in World War Z, but the B-movie premise becomes an epic story of survival in the hands of director Marc Foster. If his Quantum of Solace was too esoteric, then it’s the opposite here, as Brad Pitt traverses continents to find a cure to the fast-spreading scourge. Everything about the film moves at a breakneck pace, including the zombies. It’s a total rush.
Naturally, the day begins like any other, with parents Gerry (Pitt) and Karen (Mireille Enos of The Killing) trying to get the kids fed and into the car, but then – in classic disaster movie style – a traffic jam signals the beginning of the end. Hysteria kicks in almost immediately as the downtown streets of Philadelphia funnel a swarm of undead commuters that hits like an ever-growing wave.
Foster marshals the chaos with flair and grit, whether the camera is down on the ground being carried by the crowd, or up in the air to behold the scale of the destruction. Initially, Gerry is trying to get his family airlifted, using his credentials as a former investigator for the UN. He claims he’s no hero and his interest in saving the world has waned. He only wants to keep his loved ones safe.
His efforts to get them to the top of an apartment block could be a movie in itself (one in the traditional horror mould), but here it’s just the first act in a story that is – in style and scope – immense. Around the world, cities are falling, so once his wife and kids are safe, Gerry is strong-armed by his former boss to go out in the field and find out where this all began – and how to end it.
In a heavy stroke of symbolism, one of his stops is the Holy Land, Jerusalem, where the walls built to divide people are spectacularly breached. Individually, the undead are mindless and meandering, but together they form a scary, seething, tentacled mass of flailing limbs and gnashing teeth that spill over obstacles with deadly intent. If there is a War on Terror, it’s a war without borders.
Diehard zombie fans may find there’s not enough gore, no lingering close-ups of the undead feasting on entrails, but grossness is replaced by a richly thick atmosphere of constant threat. The hellish tableaux of cityscapes where the masses are made to look like colonies of bacteria blooming in a petri dish are truly horrifying, and Gerry is always an inch away from being swallowed up in it.
After joining forces with an Israeli soldier (Daniella Kertesz in a brooding, highly promising debut), the walls begin to close in for a blisteringly tense final act. Foster tips the panic scale in a ‘Zombies on a Plane’ scenario that eventually sees them crash into the Welsh valleys and from there, they head to a research facility where Gerry can test out a theory that may just save humankind.
Frankly, Gerry lucks out in this area, basing his hypothesis on a couple of observations and a hunch. Foster might have fleshed out this part of the story (based on Max Brooks’s novel, which takes various points of view in piecing the puzzle together). Still, by making Gerry the guinea pig, the stakes are set high and so is the body count. All this excitement could wake the dead.
