Catching Some Z

The long and winding road to bring World War Z from book to film has been well publicized. The budget ballooned, there were multiple extensive rewrites, and the entire final act of the movie was reshot. The result is a movie that bears virtually no resemblance to the book whatsoever. And that is a shame, because the book was absolutely incredible. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it resulted in a bad movie.

In fact, the movie is pretty good. Brad Pitt stars as a former United Nations employee who is drafted back to action when the zombie apocalypse arrives. The zombies of this apocalypse are exceptionally lethal, running at a breakneck pace, swarming like stampeding wildebeests, and transforming anyone they bite in a matter of seconds. Pitt's character embarks on a quest around the world to try and find the origin of the virus that created them, in the hopes that locating "patient zero" will hold the key to developing a vaccination against the outbreak.

I could easily spend paragraph after paragraph writing about how this movie is or isn't like the book, but I think in this case, that's not a particularly useful exercise. My boyfriend, who has read Robert Ludlum's novels about Jason Bourne, said you should think of this as no different from the Bourne films starring Matt Damon -- they happen to share the same titles with a series of books, and that's about it.

So then, let's just focus on what the film does well. The first act is solid, conveying a real sense of desperation and hopelessness. You feel like there can be no escape, and the reactions of society feel like an authentic response to an apocalypse.

But it's actually the third act that I found most enjoyable. After the rather hyperactive conclusion of Star Trek Into Darkness and the maniacal destructive cacophony that was Man of Steel, this summer has already made me tire of "45 minutes of explosions" to conclude a movie. So I found it incredibly refreshing that World War Z's much talked-about final act rewrite served to tone down the action and move it into solid suspense territory. The last half hour of the film is a very tense stealth mission into the heart of a zombie-infested building, with the conceit that the players must cause as little destruction as possible.

It's the middle part of the film that's the weakest, and oddly enough, it may be because it's that part of the movie that tries to be most like the book. The novel is a brilliant post-war documentary style novel, that I believe would have been best realized on screen as a "Band of Brothers with zombies" style mini-series on HBO. Such a treatment would have allowed for different episodes focused on different characters in different places, and could even have been voiced-over with mock interviews of people recounting their stories.

The middle chunk of the movie feels like it's trying to incorporate some of this sensibility. Brad Pitt's character hops all over the world, from the Atlantic Ocean to Korea to Jerusalem and more, sometimes under a slightly strained logic. Along the way, he interviews a number of people who each give their brief one- or two-minute tale of their zombie encounters. I think this was all a nod to the original book's narrative structure, but it all feels a bit untethered and unguided in the film.

Still, the opening is a more believable end of the world than any recently served up in a movie, and the finale is a marvelously tense sequence better than anything The Walking Dead has served up since season 1. In all, I'd give the movie a B. Check your love of the book at the door, and you'll find it a rather enjoyable film.