The film starts in a way that will be strange to anyone who has ever spent much time in Glasgow, as I am reliably informed that the open scenes of zombie carnage are filmed across one of Glasgow's main squares - a city that's meant to be Philadelphia in the USA. We see Brad Pitt with his all too perfect family stuck in traffic, then something a bit weird happens, then something very weird happens and before you know it we're in a full-on zombie chase across Glasgow / Philadelphia.
What happens next would be fairly typical for a zombie film, were it not that the film seems to be self conscious of the fact its a zombie film. We have a scene in which Brad Pitt gets some zombie blood in his mouth, so he has to wait on the verge of killing himself in case he turns into a zombie. It's almost as if the character Brad Pitt plays has seen one too many zombie films himself, or was in a zombie apocalypse in the past and it waiting to see which 'type' of zombie apocalypse this is. Are we in 28 Days Later or Night of the Living Dead? It feels like the makers of the film are far too aware of the fact that they're making a zombie movie and feel the need to identify World War Z in the spectrum of zombie genre movies, establishing early on that these are fast zombies and that they have to bite you to transmit the virus (it's a virus btw).
With that opening the film starts promisingly but immediately stops you suspending your own disbelief by reminding you about all the other zombie movies you might have seen. The second act begins with Brad Pitt and his family being whisked off on to a US warship and sent on a mission to save the world from the zombie apocalypse. Quite why he's qualified to do this is never made clear, people make a lot of statements about how he used to be some sort of special adviser with the UN - but little more. With this information in hand the film settles down into its mincing around phase, plenty of fluff and action sequences but nothing actually advancing the plot. The mince involves Brad Pitt going to Korea, then Israel and then trying to go to India vaguely on the trail of a cure, but at no point during any of the journey actually doing anything to find a cure.
When Brad Pitt fails to get to India, he ends up in South Wales and we move on to part 3. This is where the film becomes most baffling of all and it was little surprise to discover that this final act was in fact created as part of a re-shoot after the film was originally finished. The action moves to a research facility where Malcolm Tucker is working on a cure and then Brad Pitt comes up with an idea to make that cure work. Although at the start of the film the zombies are brutally fast whirling dervishes of death they are now shambolic Romeroesque semi-individuals who carefully check Brad Pitt out before deciding if they should eat him or not. Mostly baffling of all is perhaps the film's dramatic change in pace from action slasher to CSI-lite drama in which no one gets killed and Brad Pitt works out how to get the MacGuffin to save his family / whole world.
This is making a film by committee at its worst. It looks like there were three entirely different writer / director partnerships in charge of each of the three acts of World War Z. Despite this being a pretty major criticism, scene-to-scene World War Z is a rather enjoyable watch. There are some good action sequences, especially when the zombie shit hits the fan in several different locations around the world, and the early-film zombies are pretty scary at times. Plus there's loads of explosions and zombies scrambling over each other to get to people - all that good zombie movie stuff. In the end I don't think World War Z will be remembered much long after this year's summer blockbusters have come and gone. I suspect the film was originally conceived with good intentions that got lost when the money men and test screenings got involved. Watch it if you like, but apart from the effects there's very little to recommend.
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