So Brad Pitt finally has a big, fat tentpole picture and it turned out to be a surprise hit instead of the sure-fire flop everyone thought it would be. Hooray, right?! Well, not exactly…the movie is only so-so, and I’m afraid that it’s box office performance (the biggest of Pitt’s storied career) will inspire him to start chasing movies like this instead of the intelligent, excellent fare he’s always been drawn to (not just the Fight Club contemporary classics but the smaller-scale gems like Killing Them Softly and The Assassination of Jesse James).
What Works: Where World War Z fails in creating interesting characters or a scenario we haven’t seen before——-the fact that some are calling the premise of a zombie apocalypse “fresh” is unintentionally hilarious———it succeeds in creating great, tense set pieces. The movie is essentially one long series of action set pieces with periods in-between that don’t cost as much. I particularly enjoyed an inventive bicycle ride through the rain chased by zombies, an Israeli airplane being brought down by a visceral in-flight zombie, and a nerve-jangling sneak attack through research lab hallways.
What Doesn’t Work: Do we really think Brad Pitt is going to die halfway through the movie? Aren’t most of the suspense sequences not all that suspenseful because Pitt is surrounded by disposable people we don’t care about? A PG-13 zombie film isn’t the scariest zombie film you could imagine and that becomes a real problem as the film goes on. Plus, zombies are now so stale that they’ve lost something very necessary to tap into the darkest corners of our imagination: our sense of surprise. And did you notice earlier, when I said the movie isn’t successful at creating real characters and sharp dialogue? Only David Morse, in a surprise, nutso cameo as a rogue, toothless CIA operative (apparently North Korea holds up quite well because they’re isolated and they can remove the teeth of their docile population quite easily) really makes much of an impression.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Pitt does his best, but it would have been more effective to give his character at least one more quirk/motivation/reason-for-existence other than his family. Like maybe if he gave a shit about the end of the world and was genuinely curious about what’s going on around him would be a good start. And I’m not sure what the movie’s original ending was (the studio reshot it only a few months before the movie was released) but how could it be less memorable than the one that currently exists?