World War Z

The zombies in World War Z are effectively disturbing, but there's really no reason to watch it.

World War Z is another movie that I didn't want to see. The little ant-people in the trailer didn't make it look interesting, and neither did anything else. Roeper said it was "entertaining as hell," though, so I figured I might as well see what it was all about. It turns out my initial reaction was accurate. There isn't really any reason to see this movie, unless you just have an interest in watching Brad Pitt fight zombies.

Brad does a fine job with the character, but it's still not very believable. The guy is just too perfect. He's always calm, always joking; it doesn't work. The zombies were effectively creepy. Even if the CG did look bizarre, it was still scary seeing a crowd of zombies coming at you like that, and the speed with which they were able to turn an entire city was impressive.

I didn't get why he was bringing the Israeli soldier along, but I'm glad he did. She turned out to be important. Apparently the movie had a totally different original ending which didn't test well, where his wife gets used as a sex slave by one of the soldiers who saves her, and Brad Pitt gets recruited into the Russian army to fight zombies, until he hears about what happened with his wife, and then he and a group of other soldiers fight their way to the Pacific coast; and then they have to get to his wife in Florida, but we don't see that part. What a crazy ending that would've been. I would've thought, What a weird movie.

The way it did end wasn't satisfying, anyway. I don't like that they found a way to be immune to the zombies and fight them off. That's not how zombie movies are supposed to work. Nobody ever beats the zombies. And it doesn't make sense. I don't think zombies would care if somebody had a terminal illness, especially since the zombies themselves couldn't be affected. It did give us the entire last third of the movie at the CDC-style place, though. At first I wasn't interested in it; when they got there, I knew they were going to wind up getting what they needed, and I just wanted to skip past how they got it. I knew it was just going to be a lot of tension and scary stuff. But it was a huge part of the movie. You wouldn't have much without it.

It was weird how Brad wrote "tell my family I love them." Like they don't know that. What does he expect to happen? "He wanted you to know he loves you." "Oh, we're so glad. We thought he hated us." It was crazy that they killed off the virologist so quickly, but I guess they didn't need him. All they needed was for someone to observe the zombies in a few convenient situations so he could figure it out. It sucked that Israel went down. They were stupid for playing music like that, though. I couldn't believe their pilot took off without them, but I guess that would happen. I don't know where he thought he was going to go that wasn't infected, though.

I had a hard time with Brad's family. I didn't really like any of them. It was a stupid plot point for his wife to call him, but it was even more stupid that he had the phone turned on. I'm pretty sure he'd have it off to conserve the battery, or at the very least have it off in such an important situation. It was pretty cool that he ran to the edge of the roof and counted to make sure he wasn't going to turn, but I think he could've taken a second to shut the door first. North Korea's solution was crazy, but I don't think they'd be able to protect all their borders. They wouldn't stay safe for long.