World War Z - Film Review

*CAUTION: This review contains spoilers for World War Z. If you haven't seen it and wish to do so, proceed with caution.*

The immeasurable delays in production of World War Z has meant the resulting product has been spat out at a big time for the zombie.

Earlier this year saw Warm Bodies attempt to turn zombies into a replacement for the sparkly facsimiles of vampires in Twilight. More successful - critically and commercial - are AMC mega-hit TV show The Walking Dead and the critically successful PS3 exclusive video game The Last Of Us.

After many years lurching around as a cult concern, the works of the last decade or so have seen zombies become big entertainment business. It's a mood that has raised expectations for this - a big-budget realisation of the New York Times' best-selling book of the same name.

Or at least it should have in theory. In reality, various re-writes, re-shoots, production delays, arrests by the Hungarian authorities and general uncertainty since Brad Pitt's production company won the film rights in 2007 have led to the production seemed doomed to being a Hollywood Turkey in the eyes of many.

Critical reception has been mixed, with some loving and some hating the film. But the actual film itself has a feel of somewhere in the middle.

For a zombie film, there's a surprising lack of blood. It's remarkable how coy the film is about showing blood, when the zombies and the 15 rating indicate they shouldn't be that worried about broadcasting it.

The zombies themselves are more of the sprinting dead variety that are previously notable for use in the 28 Days Later and the more recent Dawn of the Dead remake. It works for the scope of the film in a way because they have some impressive set-pieces with them.

This is evident from the first whistle. Barely have the final bars of the Muse track Isolated System played out over the finish of the opening titles do the zombies raise their heads, overwhelming Philadelphia (well, Glasgow) and forcing the world into the film's paradigm.

The first part of the film is impressive, linking from set-piece to set-piece with aplomb. After their home city Philadelphia is obliterated by zombies, the main character Gerry Lane (Pitt) and his family (Mirelle Enos, Abigail Hargrove and Sterling Jerins) are on the run, wandering into the path of another zombie invasion further up the East Coast in Newark, New Jersey.

Here, they just manage to escape the apartment building they were holed up in by the skin of their teeth, in a scene eerily reminiscent of one from the first series of The Walking Dead, only with the rescue ending that one didn't have.

Gerry is revealed to be an ex-UN investigator and is told that, to keep his family on a safe boat out in the middle of Atlantic, he has to go back into the fold to help them figure out where the virus originated.

Pitt's character is a strange one. He is obviously very intelligent and does well to figure out the correct answers to various situations and scenarios, and he is certainly a good fit for the abundance of screen time the script gives him. But he often has moments of incredible stupidity that, in some cases, cause these problems.

The first of these comes in a dark and rain-saturated army base in South Korea, when he keeps his mobile phone on and the ringing duly attracts a small horde of undead.

This visit is the first in a 3-pronged travelogue against the end of the world. In SK, he learns of the first patients there, a way the virus has spread, the idea that burning them is the best neutralisation along with head shots, and that North Korean citizens have removed all of their teeth in a touch to escape.

After barely making it out of South Korea, Gerry heads across Asia to Jerusalem, where Israel is now completely fortified with a gigantic wall. The head of Mossad Jurgen Warmbrumm (Ludi Boeken) informs him that, as soon as they heard the mention of Indian soldiers having to fight the undead, they elected to hide. So far it's worked.

Outside the wall that is keeping them and several thousand refugees safe is several thousand ravenous zombies. This leads to a spectacular action piece, as the noise of new arrivals thinking their safe leads to a mountain of undead that rises higher and higher before coming over the wall and into the city.

In the trailers, it looked quite dumb but here, in it's full glory, its incredible spectacle. It is certainly impressive to watch zombies climbing over the wall and falling into the city before dusting themselves off and launching themselves at the general populace.

Gerry finds himself in the company of an Israeli Segen (Daniella Kertesz) who he has to amputate after a zombie bites her on the arm. Somehow, this works, and they make it onto the last plane out of Israel before the airport is overran by the zombie horde.

With that escape, Gerry's boss Secretary General Thierry (Fana Mokoena) directs him and his plane to Cardiff to use a WHO lab to help try and develop a vaccine for the uninfected population. Unfortunately, on the way, a zombie hidden on board the airplane is unleashed and soon enough the whole plane is a mass of rioting undead.

This leads to Gerry resorting to desperate and perhaps ill-thought measures, as he chucks a grenade bought along by the soldier and beds down as the plane falls from the sky, spewing zombies and baggage across the landscape below.

So far, the film has been quite good and it seems that, despite everything, they'd made it work.

This, however, is the end of the road for that theory. If it had ended here, it would've been stupidly abrupt but actually have worked quite well.

Instead, Gerry awakes impaled by a piece of fuselage amid the wreckage of their destroyed jetliner. The Segen duly escorts him to the WHO lab which is home to several doctors (Peter Capaldi, Pierfrancesco Favino, Ruth Negga and Moritz Bleibtreu) and several zombies.

This is the bit that feels a bit forced, given that this section was entirely re-written and re-shot, and which forced a 7 month delay to the film's release.

This is a noticeable dynamic change, with the rush and the fast pace of trying to leg it from zombies is sacrificed in favour of a gentler pace that loses a lot of energy. Plus a lot of the zombies waiting in the lab feel a bit... weird. They move like bad dancers in a nightclub, or in one case, teeth chattering in a similar fashion to the Were-Rabbit from the Wallace & Gromit feature film.

Anyway, now he's here, Gerry has decided that injecting himself with a lethal virus works as a camouflage-style vaccine that disguises him and makes him undetectable to the zombies, as he noted a few times while out in Jerusalem.

Getting to the biohazard lab means getting past a shitload of zombies, but somehow Pitt manages it and is able to prove the merits.

There's even time for a lengthy and absolutely pointless plug for Pepsi before he returns a hero that has given the human race a fighting chance for the likely sequel.

The whole thing leaves a very strange atmospheric. The first part of the film flows very well and has some terrific action sequences. But after the plane crash that brings the film to Wales, the film loses a lot of it's energy and feel. It all leads to a final act that is a bloated and incoherent mess that doesn't feel like it belongs from the same film.

Any sequel - and let's face it, the box office gross means there will be one - should use more of its zombies and try and avoid any messy rewrites. With any luck they'll have learnt some of their lessons with this one.

3.5/5