More than any other horror-movie subgenre, a zombie story can really create a sense of impending doom. Being stalked by a vampire, werewolf or some masked creep wielding something sharp can certainly ruin one's evening, sure, but when the dead start walking around, taking bites out of people, civilisation tends to goes to hell fairly quickly.
World War Z recognises this, and the big-budget, horror-action blockbuster has its tautest, tensest and most involving scenes early on in the piece, when the streets of Philadelphia are suddenly, shockingly overrun by a horde viciously attacking and biting anyone in its path.
A former investigator for the United Nations, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) is pressured into assisting the powers that be in leading a search for 'Patient Zero', the individual carrying the virus that started it all. And so begins a worldwide manhunt that has Lane criss-crossing the globe, bearing witness to the devastating effects of the epidemic and the radical measures various countries take to fight back.
World War Z offers up a lot more spectacle than any other zombie movie I can recall – a virtual tidal wave of the undead overwhelming Jerusalem is memorably chaotic – but this has an almost numbing effect after a while, something that does the story a disservice.
Director Marc Forster wisely takes the approach of filming much of the action with a documentary-like immediacy in a bid to place the viewer in the midst of it all, but the screenplay – substantially different from the Max Brooks novel on which it is based – staggers from scene to scene, failing to offer much reason to care about the people caught up in the nightmarish situation.
In cinemas now.
