WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS
Hollywood has decided to turn all the books I love into films, and I've come to terms with that. I've decided to delay seeing Cloud Atlas (mixed reviews) and Midnight's Children (generally poor reviews) until a time wherein I can cope with the possible mental trauma of seeing two of my most beloved novels of all time imagined in a way that I find inadequate. I live in hope, but then I did watch Dorian Gray, in which the gay subtext was rendered as a gay supertext, thus negating one of the main dynamics of the original text, and in which Colin Firth played Lord Henry Wotton looking like his own pervy uncle. So generally I go into book adaptations with low expectations, and hope that I'll be pleasantly surprised.
Max Brooks' World War Z is by no means a modern classic along the lines of the David Mitchell (no, not that one) and Salman Rushdie tomes mentioned above, but it's still a great book. It's an ostensible oral account of a zombie apocalypse, as told by its survivors, who are located in such diverse places as Tibet, the West Indies, and Antarctica. The book eschews unity of character in favour of depicting an overarching progression from outbreak to catastrophe to resistance, via short sections that are representative of this historical trajectory. It's vivid in its imagination of the horror, and its take on possible human reactions to a zombie contagion is deeply disturbing, precisely because it seems so plausible. Needless to say, it comes highly recommended.
Obviously, a narrative like this is unfilmable. You can't pack three dozen or so characters into a two-hour movie and expect the audience to keep up, especially a movie of the summer blockbuster kind. So instead of a disparate array of apocalypse survivors, we get Philadelphia native and former UN investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), fighting to save his family and the world from the marauding hordes of the undead. He travels to such exotic locations as South Korea, Jerusalem and, er, Wales, in order to find a cure for the murderous reanimation being experienced by swathes of the globe. It's a pretty simple narrative, which is fair enough. A simple narrative done well can be a wonderful thing, and I'd rather see that than a faithful but unsuccessful rendering of Brooks' rather complex and epistolary book.
I will say this for World War Z in its motion picture form; it doesn't mess around. In the first five minutes we get: Gerry's family having breakfast; Gerry's family stuck in traffic; ZOMBIES EVERYWHERE JESUS CHRIST. I felt a bit more time could have been spent on building up the eventual apotheosis of the outbreak, a la Shaun of the Dead (I know it's a comedy, but a great zombie film nonetheless), in which the zombie infestation is foreshadowed for the first third of the film. But it's a minor quibble, and there's far more significant things to criticize about World War Z.
Firstly, and this may be controversial, but THEY'RE NOT SODDING ZOMBIES. At least, not in their traditional guise. In the film there's disagreement over whether these creatures are zombies, but let me spell it out. They eat human flesh, turn their victims into one of them, and they even moan for God's sake. They are fundamentally zombies in many ways. But sadly they're the modern kind of zombie, which means that instead of lurching as in the classic Romero zombie flicks, they run at speeds that Usain Bolt could only dream of, and fling themselves at unsuspecting people like Mexican luchadores on crack. They're not just the human undead, they're the superhuman undead, which bothers me somewhat. Really, Danny Boyle has a lot to answer for where zombies in the popular imagination is concerned; his 28 Days Later is the most significant 'running dead' film (though I still count the criminally overrated Slumdog Millionaire as his most egregious cinematic sin, but that's possibly a rant for another day).
This may seem tendentious, and it's true that I am something of a zombie traditionalist and have been wanting to vent about the trope of the undead sprinter for some time. But understanding the type of zombie utilized here is fundamental to an analysis of what does and doesn't work in this film. As I see it, the difference between lurching and running zombies is the difference between the horror film and the action film. Your traditional zombie film (think Dawn of the Dead or its rhyming comedic counterpart) has a small bunch of protagonists holed up in a shopping mall or pub or some other such fortress, desperately doing battle against a horde of undead. These are lurching zombies; dangerous, but slow. The horror is psychological, rather than the cheap, sudden shocks that World War Z favours, which really made in many parts for a fairly unpleasant viewing experience. The horror arises from the knowledge that the humans are grossly outnumbered, and that there is no way of knowing how bad the contagion is, which adds to the sense of the unheimlich that the zombie represents. But for a Dawn of the Dead-like situation to be plausible, the zombies have to be slow. If the zombies in their film had been like the ones from World War Z, Shaun and Ed would never have made it out of the house.
So there is tension, but again, it's of the rather unsubtle and cheap kind; we know that a zombie's going to spring out and try to eat Gerry's face because the score has gone all eerie and silent (incidentally, the score is full of rock bombast, sound and fury signifying nothing, although that's unsurprising considering the involvement of Matt Bellamy, the frontman of overblown prog purveyors Muse). There's no real prolonged build-up of impending psychological dread. Instead, what we've got is an action film. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the nature of the zombies dovetails with the hyperkinetic cinematographical style that seems to be all the rage in the modern action film. The zombies can run; let's use a lot of shaky-cam! Imagine zombies slowly lurching while the camera zips around like an enervated wasp. It'd be inappropriate. But here, the director has made the choice to use hyperkinesis in the action sequences, and in the first of these, I was utterly lost. I couldn't make out what was going on, and which one of the battling blurs was Brad Pitt (and I don't think the darkness enforced by the 3D glasses helped). Between that, the insta-apocalypse, and Brad's annoying kids at the breakfast table, I think it's safe to say that the film didn't start well.
It got better, but I'd still make a few more criticisms. In keeping with the spirit of the original text, World War Z depicts the effect of the zombie apocalypse on myriad locations; an army base in Korea, a newly walled Jerusalem, Cardiff (which to be frank didn't look any different). This presents problems, as Brad Pitt's character isn't nearly fleshed out enough to tie these picaresque sections of the movie together. He's a former UN investigator (but even the specifics of this are vague), and he loves his family. Great. Admirable, but he's a cypher, and it hurts the film. And on a minor tangent, I know that the presence of a wife and kids is meant to engender empathy with Gerry. But he spends more time going on about his family than the fact that HUMAN CIVILIZATION IS COLLAPSING, and if you're the sort of person that needs a more personal, family-oriented dimension than the mere deaths of billions, to really make you feel what's at stake in a movie, then you're probably a sociopath.
So there's a lot wrong with World War Z. But it did a lot of things right, which brings me back to the running zombies. As I've said, running zombie-based action scenes at close quarters are fairly uninvolving and mindless. But the film's frequent aerial shots of the powerful and seemingly limitless hordes - in particular a panorama of a walled and secure Jerusalem juxtaposed with bestial chaos beyond its limits - are very effective at establishing the extent of the catastrophe. If we allow that this is the sort of film we're getting - one focused on the quantity and danger of zombies rather than the psychological effect of being surrounded by them - then shots like this can only be a plus. Honestly, it's refreshing to see a zombie film that is so profoundly conceptualised at the macro- rather than than micro-level. Again, I wouldn't say this approach to the genre is superior to that of Romero and his acolytes, but visually the sheer scale of the disaster is realized very well, however much Gerry is really fighting for his family as opposed to humanity as a whole. The one facet of the book that the film really brings forth is the disturbing imagery, whether it's bodies impaled on barbed wire, or a policeman looting a shop rather than protecting its contents. The breakdown of society comes across excellently, and it's a shame that it's couched in a film that prefers to rely on frenetic action sequences for its import, but thus is the way of the summer blockbuster, I guess. If you like zombie films then you'll either find this to be a refreshingly fast, furious and spectacular take on the genre, or a perversion of its ideals. Which basically adds up to saying; go and see it if you're curious, but don't go out of your way.
Oh, and one more time; ZOMBIES SHOULDN'T RUN.
Rating: **3/4
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