World War Z is still one of my favorite books that i pick up to read random chapters at any time. When i heard they were making a movie out of it, i was initially excited for it, then scared that they would mess it up. I found hope again when I found out that Brad Pitt is one of my favorite actors and i’m usually pretty happy in any movie that he’s in.
The biggest worry is that the actual book doesn’t have a storyline but more individual accounts by different people around the world to highlight the progression of the Zombie Apocalypse so i knew that the flow of the movie wouldn’t mirror the book, but i only hoped that they took the basic elements that Max Brooks forms about Zombies and applied them to the movie.
Overall I enjoyed the movie. I thought the flow of the movie was continuous and cycled through the tense parts along with the story telling quite evenly. The surprising factor was the lack of gore and all the attack scenes are done from afar. The only real cringe factor is when they’re scene from the other side of a fence or window. The other funny parts were those awkward moments that everyone in the audience knew was about to happen and everyone gasps or quietly says No! to themselves.
Time for the spoilers!
So what worked?
I thought the direction that they went with how they got from point A to point B was a pretty good way to get around having to back track to the very beginning. The point of getting into a movie like this is having to imagine yourself in a normal day’s situation when all of the sudden hell breaks loose. Then transitioning from a normal situation to going on a quest to solve the problem is the tricky part. I’m glad Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) wasn’t a retired military man or someone with extensive training but a UN representative who had some knowledge of survival.
Life in World War Z is pretty tough right in the get go, so being able to improvise was a key factor that I thought got pulled off really well. This goes back to the Zombie Survival Guide that started off my Zombie genre fascination and this movie actual brought in things that i’ve never read about but thought, thats really interesting.
Going into the movie i knew there were going to be jumpy moments, but i’m glad the whole movie wasn’t one big fright fest where they would focus more on the Zombies than on the storyline.
So what didn’t work?
I know that most movies need a happy ending to succeed because people hate watching failure, but somethings just happened all too conveniently that just made yourself say “yeah right!”
The zombies in the beginning of the movie were very individualistic in terms of their actions, but towards the end of the movie became a little too pack animal like. It seemed like their movements got sped up to create more drama, and their instincts became a little too thoughtful to really go along with theory of movement from hunger.
