"World War Z" - Film Review

World War Z is about a man doing everything he can to protect his family. Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a former U.N. employee, is called in to look into the cause of the viral spread that led to humanity’s crisis. The military will only allow his family to remain on an offshore naval base if he makes himself useful. And so despite how little interest he has in this, he sets out to try to find Patient Zero, the first person to have been infected. This takes him first to South Korea and then Israel and finally Wales. The film is a somewhat globetrotting one, but the film never overstays its welcome in any one location; it stays long enough for it to get in the story it needs without making us lose interest before moving on.

The film is somewhat uneven. The transitions from one part of the story to the next are poorly handled. As is, World War Z feels like a number of different stories mashed together. These different vignettes are all pretty fun in of themselves but they don't always add up to the most cohesive of films.

Not all of the action and horror in World War Z is successful. There’s a scene where zombies form a ladder and climb up over a defensive wall, and it not only stretches plausibility but isn’t all that interesting (it doesn’t help that the CGI here is pretty crappy). But much of it is rather effective and occasionally pleasingly inventive. There’s a great scene midway through upon an airplane that is one of the single best uses of zombies I’ve seen in a long time. There’s an even better scene at film’s end that is super intense and suspenseful where our hero has to grab medical supplies from a sealed off portion of a research facility. The film draws this out with engrossing and thrilling results.  

What I was most struck about World War Z was how effectively it found a story within what was at times huge zombie action taking place. The film focuses in on a few people and it makes the drama and our investment based in these handful of people, and it does this well. We start the film in the home of Gerry with his family. The story follows them out into traffic, where they get caught in the middle of a zombie invasion into Philadelphia. And we keep following these people, seeing the drama through their eyes. In this way the action never becomes all-consuming or distracting, like say in Man of Steel. Though a number of these characters never really get developed enough, Brad Pitt gives an assured performance as Lane. 

There are weaker and more questionable moments, and it's uneven in places, but World War Z is largely entertaining.  

Grade: B-