Poster of World War Z

World War Z

Action, Adventure, Horror

Director: Marc Forster

Release Date: June 21, 2013

Where to Watch

Does anyone have a good recipe for crow because I believe that I have to eat some? Anyone with a passing familiarity of me knows several things about me: I find Brad Pitt to be an awful actor who substitutes a blank stare for gravity (Troy, Meet Joe Black, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) or acting like a crazy person to show that he has range (12 Monkeys) and is not attractive (the setting of his eyes makes him look like a primate); Marc Forster is not a director that I enjoy because he directed Quantum of Solace, my least favorite Daniel Craig as James Bond film, and is a proponent of chaos cinema; I will quarrel extensively that slow zombies make more sense than fast ones; and I loved the book World War Z (think the Hot Zone meets the influenza epidemic during WWI and has a documentary feel) and generally if I read a book, I always find the movie an inferior product, especially considering it is a book with no central characters yet the film’s casting choice seemed not to reflect that aspect of the book. I am delighted to say that the movie is not an adaptation of the book yet it remains faithful to the spirit of the book. Certainly the film respects the tropes of a worldwide disaster movie and attracts a broader audience by giving us the white family that must be saved and the impossible to kill Great White Hope to save his family and maybe the world, but I was delighted to see a multicultural, international and some subversion of traditional gender roles in this film. There were a couple of times when I arched an eyebrow, such as when Pitt takes his family to stock up on supplies after the outbreak of zombie apocalypse to a city that I try not to visit now, but the movie hits the right notes with its take on how daily life changes, gave a hardened viewer like me a few good and unexpected jumps and hit a few historical reference transcendent notes that I found moving. Chaos cinema works in this context, particularly the opening credits and how it visually made it plausible why zombies would be fast though if you think about it, it still doesn’t make sense. I’ve often said that though I don’t enjoy Brad Pitt as an actor, I think that real life Brad Pitt is probably decent, and I would share a meal with him. I think that he made a good choice to basically play himself and in an exaggerated way, act like he would act in this scenario. See it on the big screen & don’t wait for it to come out on Netflix. I wouldn’t even mind seeing it again. Forgot to mention that the way that I consoled myself about it not being like the book was pretending that it was one chapter in the book & a good sequel would be another chapter following someone from another nation, ethnicity, gender, etc.

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