Review of World War Z (2013) by Jim T — 19 Dec 2014

George Romero officially started the age of the modern movie with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. His zombies were slow, plodding, and relentless. The terror in Romero's films came from a sense of unavoidable fate...the zombies were never going to stop coming. Eventually, be it by exhaustion, by inattention to detail, or simply by losing the will to fight, you would succumb to the undead.

By the early 2000's, Danny Boyle's 28 DAYS LATER and Zack Snyder's reboot of Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD introduced us to fast moving zombies. Terror came swiftly, and the slow-of-foot were not going to live long. The undead were still relentless, but now they ran like sprinters in a coke frenzy. Zombies from the 60s and 70s were like glaciers; zombies from the 00s were like forest fires.

Enter WORLD WAR Z, the lastest film by Marc Forster. His zombies aren't glaciers. They're not forest fires. They're tsunamis; waves of undead rolling over one another, destroying everything in their path. The visual effect can sometimes be terrifying. It can also be mind-numbing, and that's where I found myself. Some of the moments were too over-the-top to be completely believable, and by the end of the film, I had had enough of zombie tsunamis. Maybe that's a huge endorsement and I don't know it yet. I'll let you decide.

Anyway, there's enough meat in WORLD WAR Z to satisfy the avid undead aficionado. Don't expect to fall in love with any of the characters...there really isn't a lot of character development. This usually doesn't bother me in a monster movie, but in WWZ it seemed like the writers were actually trying, and therefore failing, to make me care about these people. Perhaps I've fallen too much in love with AMC's THE WALKING DEAD to expect anything less than well-rounded meals to feed my undead.