Movies don’t come bigger than this, and zombie flicks tend to come an awful lot smaller. In Shaun of the Dead, the undead had to content themselves with snacking off a handful of British actors in a deserted pub. Here, it’s the future of humanity at stake.
This
time, Brad Pitt is here to save us, and the skies are soon full of
crashing helicopters, screaming jets and stuntpeople being sucked out of
aircraft.
So what’s it like? Well, it’s awfully like all the epic action films made by Roland Emmerich, ranging from the nearly sublime (Independence Day) to the totally ridiculous (10,000 BC). It’s slap-bang in the middle of that quality spectrum, round about the level of Godzilla and not quite as classy as The Day the World Ended.
Scroll down for trailer
Brad Pitt in action in World War Z where he stars as an American UN worker and father
The
film is most impressive in its big set-pieces. The initial panic on the
streets of Philadelphia is thrillingly done, as is the fall of
Jerusalem to the zombie horde. There’s also an effective airborne
sequence.
But it is horrifyingly feeble when it comes to characterisation. Brad Pitt’s hero lacks personality. All we know is that he loves his family, but no one has given him or his relations any exceptional qualities.
A
key fault is that we never find out why the powers-that-be at the
United Nations think so highly of Pitt. He’s resourceful, but he doesn’t
seem particularly brave, bright or knowledgeable. It is a central
weakness of the film that, without any particular expertise, he solves
the mystery of how to fight the zombies before anyone else. It’s as
though no one except him is paying attention.
World
War Z has had what might euphemistically be called a troubled history,
with producer-star Pitt publicly at odds with director Marc Forster, who
shows here once again that he is more confident with small-scale
projects (such as Finding Neverland) than action adventures (such as the
Bond bore-a-thon, Quantum of Solace).
Pitt attended the UK premiere of World War Z with wife Angelina Jolie at the Empire, Leicester Square
After
negative reaction within the studio, the final 40 minutes were rewritten
and reshot at a cost of $200million. It’s hard to know where the money
went. The long, would-be climactic sequence inside a Welsh research
laboratory looks about as lavish as the average episode of Doctor Who.
Brad
Pitt introduced the screening I attended, and promised the audience
‘the most intense film you’re going to see this summer’. He called it
‘original’ and ‘genre-bending’. If only it were.
Okay,
the zombies are not the slow-moving undead of yesteryear. They’re
sprightly, aggressive and eager to bite. It’s like a planet seething
with Mike Tysons and Luis Suarezes, doing lots of jerky, uncoordinated
dance moves that look like Jarvis Cocker in the heyday of Pulp. But
they’re not original. They were like that in Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake
of Dawn of the Dead.
It’s
a tedious cliché that Pitt is torn between nurturing his cute children
and rescuing the whole of mankind. No one except him is going to think
that’s a tough call, but Pitt spends too much of the first hour chewing
his lip over it.
If
you’ve read Max Brooks’ original book, published in 2006, you will know
that Pitt’s character is a UN worker trying to piece together the truth
from a variety of sources.
Apparently,
the first draft of the script, by J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote
Changeling, Clint Eastwood’s classy drama starring Brad’s wife Angelina
Jolie, was faithful to the source material.
Producer
Pitt and Paramount junked that investigative structure, which might
have turned into a movie along the lines of District 9, All The
President’s Men or even Citizen Kane, in favour of a straightforward
hero-to-the-rescue scenario.
That
was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, who scripted the
undistinguished Kingdom and Lions for Lambs. Despite numerous others
being recruited to rework the ending, Carnahan gets the main credit,
shared with Drew Goddard (who directed The Cabin in the Woods) and Damon
Lindelof, head writer on Lost.
None of the writers is at his best, and the film bears unmistakable signs of having been assembled by a Hollywood studio over-preoccupied with earning a family-friendly certificate. Virtually all the violence takes place fractionally off-screen. Disappointingly, the final product is much more conventional than the book and avoids its most interesting and innovative qualities.
Pitt's character in the film is a father torn between looking after his family and saving the world
Brooks’
purpose was to satirise the bungling of government, the excesses of
survivalism and the dangers of corporate power. In the book, the zombie
virus spreads from China via refugees and an illicit trade in human
organs. Pakistan and Iran destroy each other in a nuclear dispute over
border controls. Cuba becomes the world’s most thriving economy and the
centre of international banking.
Paramount
evidently think political stuff is too much for a cinema audience.
Maybe they’re also nervous about how it might go down in China, Pakistan
and Iran, not to mention America. So they’ve played safe and turned the
story into a one-man triumph for an American UN operative with guts,
intellect and movie-star looks.
World
War Z isn’t terrible. Parts are impressive and exciting. But the
incredibly long distance it falls short of its source material means it
must rank as one of Hollywood’s most wasted opportunities.
There
are estimates that the movie will have to gross $550million merely to
break even. Its lack of originality, ingenuity and personality means
that it has virtually no chance of making back that scale of investment.
Last
year’s most underperforming blockbuster, John Carter, is said to have
lost Disney over $200million and resulted in regime change within the
studio.
If I were a senior Paramount executive, I would be afraid. Very, very afraid.