What does $200 million of
Paramount’s money get you these days? Certainly
not a fantastic Star Trek
movie – that was proven last month. World War Z proves that it can
buy you a gaggle of screenwriters, if you define a “gaggle” as five or
more. The completed movie, however, proves
that said gaggle of screenwriters can’t guarantee you an interesting, much less
coherent, screenplay.
It’s been said that when a popular
genre reaches a point where filmmakers are producing comedies or parodies of
it, that’s a sure sign the genre has all but “played out.” While World
War Z may not be a parody (Warm
Bodies, from earlier this year, would better fit that bill), it’s at
least a sign that the zombie genre is almost dried up from a dramatic
viewpoint. If the old saying about too
many cooks spoiling the broth is relatable to filmmaking, then a slew of names
under the “written by” credit should be taken as a cause for concern. Brad Pitt’s production company won a bidding
war five or six years ago for the rights to Max Brooks’ (son of Mel) novel
about the oral history of a worldwide zombie pandemic. Of course, this film bears no resemblance
whatsoever to that novel, outside of its title and the fact that there are
zombies in it, but Hollywood knows best, so out goes all the introspective,
human stories and in goes swarms and swarms of computer-generated zombie
termites, crashing helicopters, artillery fire and nuclear explosions. Heaven forbid should somebody make a movie
about people describing their experiences in such a fantastically terrifying
time as a zombie apocalypse – nobody would want that, right?
Pitt cast himself in the lead
role, that of one Gerry Lane (a name which, for some reason, planted a Beatles’
song in my head and never let it go), who before his recent retirement, was
some sort of go-to investigator-type guy for the United Nations at one point,
although the movie doesn’t bother explaining any more than that to us. He, his wife and two daughters manage to
escape Philadelphia, by way of Newark, as the pandemic breaks out, narrowly and
miraculously avoiding swarming death several times before being rescued and
taken out to a helicopter carrier which serves as… Oh, screw it. None of it matters, because you’ve seen all
this before! Did you see 28 Days Later? Then you’ve seen this. Did you see the pilot episode of “The Walking
Dead?” Then you’ve seen this. The filmmakers have spurned a totally
original take on the zombie-movie provided to them by the source novel for
which they paid an astronomical sum of money, and instead chosen to make a
zombie flick as they imagine Roland Emmerich might have.
Okay, sure, the zombies here evoke
“hive” or “swarm” behavior, similar to flocks of birds or colonies of insects,
presaged by images of those creatures in the opening credits. This could be construed as slightly different
from some other zombie flicks, but why do they behave this way? Well, not only is that never explained, we’re
also never even given a hint about what actually started all of this. Oh, sure, there are couple lines of dialogue
about somebody biting a doctor in Korea, and the Indian Army “fighting the
undead,” but those plot points are never explored.
Gerry’s wife and kids? What about
them? They’re nothing more than a plot
device, giving Gerry a reason to call back to the command ship and
serendipitously get information that leads him to the movie’s next CGI-created
set-piece. Heck, for all we learn about
those characters, “wife and kids” is really all the identification they
require. When a senior military official
refers to them as “non-essential personnel” at one point, I wondered for a
second if it was meant as a joke.
Why Brad Pitt would be so devoted
to such a project that he would throw a good chunk of his own money at it sort
of baffles me, too. Don’t kid yourself,
folks – Pitt considers himself a “serious” actor, and maybe with exception of Troy, has never done the “summer
blockbuster” movie before. What’s even
more baffling is how the movie we finally get to see is a lot LESS a spectacle
picture than was originally intended.
The final forty minutes of the movie are a complete rewrite/reshoot,
eliminating a third act that would have centered around a massive zombie battle
all throughout Moscow (a good portion of which was actually even filmed, but
now won’t see the light of day) into the more intimate, thriller-type ending we
get now. I’ve read of how the original
ending played poorly with test audiences, as well as Paramount executives, and
how screenwriter Damon Lindelof, the man who made such an absolute mess of the Prometheus script last year, was
brought aboard to formulate a new ending.
While that ending is the most zombie movie-like story arc of the entire
film, it’s too little/too late by that point.
We’ve learned so little about Gerry, much less the characters who
inhabit the medical research facility in which he finds himself, that it’s hard
to feel much dread over what possible horrible fate may await him.
I’ve said in some previous review that once
you’ve seen one zombie movie, then for the most part, you’ve pretty much seen
‘em all, and that remains so. Given that
semi-debatable fact, the only thing that can differentiate one zombie flick from
another is the stable of characters inhabiting the story. Since I really don’t know any more about
Gerry Lane, his wife and/or his kids at the end of this movie than I did at the
beginning, much less any cause for the pandemic, was their any point in my
seeing it, other than to see that Paramount was willing to spend $200 million
to convince me zombies can clickity-clack their teeth and swarm like ants…?
