Did anyone expect a zombie movie from the director who
brought you
Stranger Than Fiction
(one of the best metafictional films) and
Quantum
of Solace (one of the less inspiring Bond films in recent memory)? Maybe I expected a talkier film from Marc
Forster, especially because of the epistolary format of the eponymous Max
Brooks novel, but what I got was something more engaging – an entertaining
blockbuster-lite with some thrilling zombie set pieces.
Brad Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, average joe with classified
UN experience which comes in handy when teeming hordes of the undead take over
Philadelphia – and, Gerry learns, most of the world. In exchange for his family’s safety, Gerry
agrees to escort a leading physician in search of a cure, a harrowing search
which will take Gerry around the world and face to face with speedy, deadly
zombies.
Devotees of the Brooks book will likely find fault with the
fact that the film streamlines the book’s narrative, eliminating most of the
political commentary and torqueing the story toward a more action-based
plot. (In fact, I suspect you could
change the name of the film and those folks might like it better.) While I miss the governmental satire Brooks
brought to the genre, portraying political leaders as bumbling naysayers until
it’s too late, I found the book a bit repetitive, duplication which the film
eliminates by focusing on Gerry Lane and not his interviewees.
This change allows Forster to focus more on in-the-moment
experiences of the zombie apocalypse rather than reflect nostalgically on the
experience. While the latter has its
advantages in a literary form, it’s hard to imagine that being a compelling
film (perhaps as a mockumentarian experiment?).
Instead, Forster drops us in on the day of the zombie disaster,
literally in the middle of a traffic jam with only pancakes to prepare us. Granted, this comes at the expense of
character development; we don’t know much about what makes Gerry or anyone else
in the film tick beyond basic survival.
Conversely, the film mercifully avoids padding out the cast with stock
survivor characters (see
Shaun of the Dead for a gleeful vivisection of these tropes) by following Gerry.
It’s likely Pitt’s star power that elicits the audience’s
sympathies more so than the strength of the script, but Forster makes up for
the script’s shortcomings (with Brooks, five writers – too many cooks?) by
prizing spectacle over protagonist. By
staging a series of progressively more intricate and more terrifying zombie
confrontations (I counted seven), Forster creates a deeply personal involvement
with the audience, who can’t help but hold their breath once it becomes
apparent that zombies react to sound.
Simultaneously, the shifting setting creates a global feel for a genre
that too often has been bogged down by the stale locked-room plot (cf.
Mulberry Street done wrong,
Dawn of the Dead done right).
Want zombies in the metropolis? Sure, you’ve seen it before, but rarely with
the terror-of-the-unseen rendered here.
Zombies on a plane? (Where’s Sam
Jackson when you need him?)
WWZ’s got those, too. And if you liked those two, Forster outdoes
himself with the film’s final big zombie scene, which collects all the bits the
film introduces to the mythology and throws them together into a tense sequence
requiring silence and sharp reflexes – almost like a video game level but
without the passivity that often plagues such moments. Here especially, Forster knows when to go for
the jugular and when to pause for a moment of levity (thank God for Pepsi, that’s
all I’ll say).
Taken holistically,
World
War Z isn’t the “complete package” that zombie aficionados might expect from
the genre, but what
WWZ lacks in
innovation it atones for with execution.
With those house lights dimmed and nothing between moviegoers and the screen,
the bumps in the dark create an effective cinematic experience that ends up
being more fun than I expected.
World War Z is
rated PG-13 “for intense frightening zombie sequences, violence and disturbing
images.” The zombies are pretty freaky –
pale veiny skin with translucent eyes, snarls and gnashing teeth with dried
flecks of blood. The blood doesn’t flow
as freely as elsewhere in the genre, but plenty of bodies are felled by biting,
gunfire, and blunt force trauma; in an intense but brisk moment, a hand is
amputated.
Stranger than Fiction
(2006) – Given the very literary quality of this Monday’s film, I’d like to
start with an analogy from the realm of the book. They say (and my experience
has proven) that every time you read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, you find something new, a
clever play with the graphic novel form or an allusion that clicks another cog
of the text into coherence. In the way that rereading brings clarity to Watchmen, re-watching Stranger than Fiction sheds an intense
light on just how beautiful this
movie is. Now, beauty isn’t something upon which I remark often here, but there
is something very transcendent about Stranger
than Fiction’s interrogation of what makes a life significant. Will Ferrell
stars as Harold Crick, a tax auditor whose midlife crisis takes the form of his
life being narrated by a novelist (Emma Thompson) prone to killing off her
characters. Amid Harold’s attempts to stay alive, he falls in love with
anarchist baker Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in what is honestly one of my
top ten love stories of all time. The script by Zach Helm is so smart, living
up to the metafictional braininess of the concept, and director Marc Forster controls
the pace of the film with a grace that was sorely missed in his Quantum of Solace. Ferrell, better known
for his often irksome work with the rest of his Frat Pack ilk, gives a
wonderfully understated performance here, ostensibly a career-best; he can
break your heart with a murmured “Oh...” or lead you to more fulfilling
laughter with his subtle quirks than in ten shouty Zoolanders. The supporting cast is a very successful ensemble,
including Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah, but there is an overall sense of
being in the quiet presence of inconspicuous greatness that I take away from Stranger than Fiction. It very well may
be a perfect film, for it has never disappointed me in all the times I’ve come
back to it.
