World War Z, review

World War Z, review

Dir: Marc Forster; Starring: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Sterling Jerins, Matthew Fox, James Badge Dale, Eric West. 12A cert, 116 min. The first problem you encounter with World War Z, the new action blockbuster starring Brad Pitt, is how to pronounce the damn thing. Should the last letter be said "zee", to sound like "three", or "zed", to sound like "dead", or "zzz", to sound like the audience? Whichever phoneme you plump for, the Z stands for zombie, and the film contains, on a rough estimate, hundreds of thousands of them. It is based on a novel by Max Brooks, son of the filmmaker and humourist Mel, and it follows Gerry Lane (Pitt), a flaxen-haired former United Nations action man who is recalled to the line of duty when a mysterious pandemic turns citizens of various countries into walking, chomping corpses. Brooks’s novel was a thinly-veiled parable about American foreign policy and post-millennial anxiety, told from several points of view: in fact, it had much in common with Steven Soderbergh’s terrific 2011 medical thriller Contagion. Marc Forster’s film junks the satire and multiple perspectives, and instead recasts the story as an uncomplicated globe-trotting thriller. On one side we have Lane and a roster of temporary sidekicks, and on the other, an inexhaustible supply of the living dead. What we get is a collection of moderately violent action set-pieces untroubled by humour or broader coherence. Lane travels from Philadelphia (played on-screen by Glasgow) to Nova Scotia via New York, New Jersey, South Korea, Israel and Wales, and almost nothing that happens along the way has the slightest effect on the film’s final outcome. Perhaps this should come as no surprise: shortly after filming on World War Z was thought to be complete, seven weeks of extra shooting took place in Budapest, which was followed by the writing and filming of an entirely new third act later in the year. Whatever direction the film was originally headed in, someone important obviously thought better of it.



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