World War Zzzzzzzz

First, let’s get one thing straight: This movie is NOT World War Z. If you read the book and saw the previews, you knew it wasn’t going to be World War Z, but for those of you that didn’t, please go read the book immediately so you know exactly how much they screwed you out of your ten bucks. Research shows that World War Z is a 4 part documentary by Ken Burns, narrated by Keith David. This is scientific people. There’s a process! I could write about all of the ways in which the film is different (and much, much worse) than the book, but if I did that my review would probably be as long as the novel itself. So for the purposes of this review, I’m going to call it Zombiedrameda Strain, and try to just look at it on its own merits.

When I went in to the theatre, I was hoping that I would end up seeing Brad Pitt Vs. Zombies, much like I, Robot was Will Smith Vs. Robots. Sadly, that was not the case. It ended up being a kind of tolerable environmental disaster film in which the disaster mostly revolves around the abject stupidity of everyone in the movie. I repeat again, this is NOT a zombie movie. If you like zombie movies and want to see a zombie movie, go watch some other movie that might actually be a zombie movie. This one is a lot closer to The Core, or The Day After Tomorrow.

You can tell a movie is a zombie movie if it actually has very little to do with the zombies. The zombies themselves exist only to create a situation in which the characters of the film can have their humanity, their complexity revealed to the audience. I can’t even remember the names of any of the characters that were in Zombiedrameda Strain, and the movie doesn’t really expect or need me to. The only real character motivation that exists in this movie is on the same level as Arnold Schwartzeneggar in Commando.

Instead, the zombies of the movie serve pretty much the same role as a massive flood or super volcano, or whatever environment disaster that is the SyFy feature of the week. The nature of the zombification isn’t really explored at all, the characters beyond Brad Pitt aren’t given any development (his character isn’t either, really), and we get no thought about the nature of humanity. Instead the movie revolves around fleeing the disaster while searching for the pseudo-science solution to the problem.

The intensity of the movie is driven by each character you meet doing the dumbest possible thing they could at the time, which throws Brad Pitt into jeopardy again and again. You get everything from “doctor that trips and kills himself” to “people smart enough to build a huge wall but not smart enough to actually watch the zombies outside” to “guy who bumps into or trips over every single prop laid out on the set”. The characters emphasize time after time that the zombies are attracted to noise. Yet no one ever decides to use noise to lure zombies away from people. Attach a radio to a helicopter, leads hordes of zombies into the Grand Canyon. Roll credits.

No, instead of someone in the movie coming up with an actual workable plan that involves any kind of scientific thinking, the solution that we get is rooted in mystical “animals can do spooky things we don’t understand” beliefs. Sometimes animals avoid sick things, so the zombies avoid terminally sick people, so we’d better give ourselves doses of terminal diseases in order to be invisible to the zombies. That is seriously the entire rationale behind the “winning” of the movie. I don’t expect real science from my movies, but I do expect decent logic. This solution was basically the same thing as saying that creating really good feng shui would unlock the zombie’s chakra points and let them ascend into Xanadu. Bah.

Zombiedrameda Strain does include some obvious references back to the novel, but they mostly serve to make you frustrated that you didn’t get the World War Z movie you wanted. It also includes some great actors, all of whom spend their time on screen desperately casting about for any spar of humanity to grab onto amidst the sea of terrible writing. In the end, it all comes down to this: it was a zombie movie that did not make me afraid, sad, thoughtful, or hopeful. Mostly it just made me look at my watch and wish it was a shorter movie.