Director: Marc Forster
Starring: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale.
Running Time: 111 minutes
Extras: Origins, Looking to Science
WORLD WAR Z, loosely based on the novel of the same name by Max Brooks, sees the world suddenly taken over by a deadly plague. After escaping an acute attack on his native Philadelphia, former UN investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) must leave his family behind to travel across the globe to find a cure and in true Hollywood blockbuster style, save the day.
The production of WORLD WAR Z is infamous. Troubled shoots, hurried re-shoots, delayed street date, a budget spiralling into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and a sequel allegedly cancelled during principal photography. If you were to say that the lead up to the release of the film had Hollywood on edge, then you’d be making an massive understatement. But, could a zombie film costing north of $190 million dollars be successful and even turn a profit?
The odds weren’t great, and after having seemingly everything going against it from the off, WORLD WAR Z made a huge $540 million at the worldwide box-office earlier this summer. To make that kind of money after costing that kind of money, certain sacrifices had to be made. Sure, the pull of Brad Pitt is still there and would have guaranteed some box-office return, and the huge action set-pieces would have drawn some attention to the early promos, but to make it accessible to the masses, Marc Forster and his team had to ensure that this film easily secured that 12A rating, tricky for a zombie movie, and it suffers because of it. I’d heard tales of the film, while getting actually receiving the preferred certificate by the BBFC, coming in at the high end of the rating with some scenes of extremely graphic nature, but if anything the film feels a bit empty and almost insulting to the genre. In an age where the likes of The Walking Dead are quite simply getting away with bloody murder on terrestrial television week in week out, you have to ask: Where is the blood? Where is the gore? And also, why is the camera panning away from that head kill? Why didn’t we see that hand get chopped off? It. Just. Doesn’t. Feel. Right. Right? That said, the DVD review copy THN is reviewing is actually branded with a 15 certificate. It still felt the same.
Sure, Brad Pitt is as gorgeous as ever, and the picture painted at the time of production is way off the mark as this is definitely not a bad movie. It does however, try to deliver too much, taking in too many locations and not enough human connections for us to give a damn. Good, but after reading such an amazing novel from Brooks, could have been so much better.
WORLD WAR Z is released on DVD in the UK on Monday 21st October, 2013
