World War Z may be about zombies, but the film itself is a Frankenstein's Monster.
Brad Pitt's production company acquired the rights to Max Brooks' virtually unfilmable novel all the way back in 2007, and the project has since passed through a string of writers' hands, including two – Lost alums Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard – who were called in at the eleventh hour to completely rewrite the film's third act.
Notorious long before its release for its chaotic re-shoots and ballooning budget, the film also excised a key plot point about the zombie outbreak's origins to avoid pissing off Chinese distributors, and several scenes were dropped in order to dilute the film's political undertones. (For most people, those undertones were what set Brooks' novel apart from other zombie fare in the first place.)
By rights, then, this should be a toothless, watered down disaster. In reality? It is toothless and watered down – virtually no trace of Brooks' Hurricane Katrina allegory can be found in the finished film. But it's certainly not a disaster.
It's actually, against all odds, an extremely solid entry in an over-crowded genre. Zombies seem to have been all over our TV and movie screens for the past 10 years, but this loose translation of World War Z manages to find angles that haven't been played out yet.
Not just a zombie movie, it's also a summer blockbuster, operating on a far grander scale than any horror movie; it's a detective story, complete with a compelling mystery and a satisfying resolution; and it's a globe-trotting thriller, as UN trouble shooter Gerry Lane (Pitt) and his vaguely defined skill set step straight out of the pages of an airport novel to hunt down leads around the world. Honestly, it's just nice to see a proactive character in a zombie story.
Director Marc Forster's approach to the action is strangely bloodless (perhaps it's not that strange, considering how wide the audience needs to be for this film to make a profit), but it isn't without flair. He pulls off some tremendously effective jump-scares, and does an excellent job of ramping up the tension with the major set pieces (particularly the aeroplane sequence, a highlight of the trailers that doesn't disappoint).
Perhaps most importantly, the seams don't show as much as you'd expect with a production this troubled. For the most part, it flows smoothly, and if I hadn't already been aware of the behind-the-scenes dramas that went into making this movie, I doubt I'd have spotted them on the screen.
The end result might not have enough legs to spin off into a full-blown franchise, as Pitt envisioned, but it's still far, far better than it had any right to be. It's a Frankenstein's Monster, sure, but it's alive.
