Hello world! It would seem that Cinema-Rant has risen from the grave after weeks with no internet connection. It’s taken a hard toll on me, can you tell?
What have I done in the mean time? Well, I could bore you with all the responsible day to day activities that I’ve definitely done because I’m such an independent adult…or I could tell you about the money and time I’ve pissed away in the cinema. What a Sophie’s Choice!
Of course we’re gonna stick to the movies, and zombie movies at that, because we just had the world wide release of World War Z!
That’s right, the zombie pandemic has hit globally once again. Keep an eye out for this genre, I think it’s gonna be big one day.
For the first time, however, we have Brad Pitt in the center of it all. Has Brad Pitt ever been in a zombie movie before? My savant-like knowledge of film trivia (in other words a scroll down the pages of IMBD) tells me that…no, he hasn’t. That is, unless you stretch the criteria and count Meet Joe Black or Interview with the Vampire. Beyond that, the pouty blonde has never before faced down swarms of the undead like he does in this film.
There are those who like zombie films, and those who love zombie films. I love zombie films, and as such I have very high standards. I’ve seen all the classics and many of the obscure titles. My favourite is Zack Snyders 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and my least favourite is George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead. Both Romero’s epic original trilogy and the modern reinventions like 28 Days Later offer thrills and chills that heat my blood into a frenzy. I won’t have any slamming statements against the genre as a whole, it’s an entertaining and intelligent reflection on the internal destructive forces of human society. But this film…
…is also a great addition to the zombie lore! (Mwaha! Didn’t see that coming, did you?) Nothing I saw or heard about this movie impressed me beforehand. It looked cheesy, overdone, clichéd, and generally plotless. I won’t tell you to bother watching the trailer, because it’s horrible. Go into this movie completely cold and you’ll have a whale of a time…like I did:
Perhaps that’s overstating it a little, but this movie has a lot of great moments! In fact, the word ‘movie’ is a misnomer here. What you’re given is a continuously escalating series of nail biting “last minute escape” sequences.
There is no real plot to speak of, just a series of struggling locations around the world which Brad Pitt has to visit on his search for “patient zero”; the origin of the zombie virus. Each time Pitt lands in a new country, he’s welcomed by a successfully isolated group of survivors. As zombie lore dictates, however, one bite is all it takes to start the domino effect. With a human-to-zombie turnaround rate of mere seconds, one infection instantly becomes a hundred. If I had to discern a theme from this steroid-fuelled undead free for all…it would have to be “panic”.
The writers attempted to create a central drama by introducing Pitt with his perfect nuclear family, but does anyone care? No! In fact the filmmakers seemed to give up early on anyway. I never felt a great urge to explore his, or anyone else’s, backstory. All I knew was that when a zombie broke into the crowd I sat up and repeated “get out now, get out now, get out now, go, go, go, get out!” followed by a relieving “Jesus, that was close!”. World War Z gives you the same feeling as playing British bulldog with lethal consequences. Bombastic tension and frenzy of the purest kind! Expect little and receive a lot.
– Zombie rant over!
