Going into this film I had absolutely no positive expectations, for over a year I kept track of this particular film and was well aware of its very long and very troubled development. From constant changes to the script, various re-shoots, close to a dozen writers being brought on to the project and insanely high production costs were just some of the films many, many problems during production. Being a fan of the book I was also among those not pleased by the changes that were seemingly being done and from the outset a World War Z movie instead of an HBO TV series seemed just plain idiotic to me. With all of these various problems, does World War Z manage to actually be good or is it just as bad as you might think it is? Lets find out.
Unlike many other zombie film, the story actually takes place at the very start of the out break and you get to see civilization as we know it crumble under this new threat and we get to see how it effects various countries across the globe. These two things were instant pluses or the film, often in zombie fiction I find myself wondering whats going on with the governments and other countries of the world during this crisis and especially during the early days and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the film got rid of many of the tired zombie flick tropes often associated with the genre and it showed that the creators were sticking to the book. The film truly shows how this catastrophy effects different countries in different ways and it shows how they combat it.
Like in the book Israel and North Korea are the first countries to shut down their borders and prepare for the apocalypse while everyone else is oblivious, Russia and India are just black holes where everything is being destroyed and we get to see it all if only briefly. It shows that while they did take liberties with the source material, the global, political, social, economic ramifications of a zombie apocalypse on the world are still present here and work to good effect. 
Unlike the book, the zombies (and they are called zombies straight up in the film which is another plus) who are exactly the same as the ones in the Walking Dead, the zombies in the film are fast, agile, vicious and scary as all hell. Just seeing these crazy mother fuckers just run after you in the thousands while jumping in the air like apes or something made them a thousand times more threatening than the traditional slow zombies, needless to say I was scared shitless of them in the film.
Plus the zombies actually look a LOT better than they did in the trailers, in the trailers they looked like giant, poorly rendered CGI ants and they added to my disdain of the film pre-release, however in the actual film they look very much like the Walking Dead zombies and even have the Last of Us thing where they keep making clicking noises with their teeth which was creepy as all hell.And thats how this film is from the beginning until the end, its tense and creepy like no other zombie film since 28 Days Later, I was constantly on the edge of my seat and even during the moments everything seemed fine I was unable to escape the sense of dread and fear which kept its hold on me until the credits rolled.
While the film is PG-13 and many will find this a hard thing to swallow, I actually think it worked to its advantage. So many times zombie films just have gore and blood for the sake of having gore and blood, it rarely feels neccesary to me and often it feels like its just there for shock value. For this one they used a less is more approach which I liked. At the same time however there were some scenes where they should have showed something a bit nastier and the camera pulls away and its not done in a particularly good way, in fact it was pretty choppy and awkward.
The action was, for the most part, very well shoot and it added to the tension present throughout. It showed enough of the death and destruction going on but during some of the more personal encounters it cut away just enough for the kill to be brutal but also to give the audience a chance to imagine it in their heads. While I did like a lot of things about the film, the overall story and characters (or lack thereof) were the primary problems. Brad Pitt does a great job as Gerry Lane, hes an ex UN investigator who has clearly gone through some pretty traumatic things in his life and wants to keep his family safe from the zombie hoards while also going around the world and trying to find a cure to the infection.
His performance is actually pretty good and you can tell he put a lot of effort into the role. His family on the other hand is kind of a mixed bag, we don’t really see him interact with them enough to genuinely care about them as characters and the only reason we even kind of give a damn about them is so Gerry can complete his mission. Another problem is there is no real supporting cast, Gerry goes around the world and meets different people who we never see again and are only there to advance the plot, I only gave a damn about one of them in the whole film, the rest were either generic scientist or generic soldier.
I will say that the solution for the zombie infestation was really, really imaginative and while it does give humanity a fighting chance it doesn’t give them a complete and utter advantage over the zombies, it keeps the threat of these scary bastards there but also giving humanity some hope.
All in all I really enjoyed World War Z, it was tense, really scary at some points and it kept a lot of the things I loved about the book in tact and made some of the scariest zombies I have seen yet, but the plot can be very predictable at points, Gerry’s family is just there to give him a reason to do all of this and the rest of the cast is really generic. But if you want a zombie film thats really tense, exciting and thankfully gets rid of many of the genres clichés that have, in my opinion, held them back, you are in for a damn good time.
FINAL VERDICT: B+
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