92 - World War Z

     After a zombie-like virus spreads around the world, the surviving government/military recruit a man, played by Brad Pitt, to investigate the cause of the outbreak, and hopefully find a solution to the problem.
     I had really low hopes for this one, since I had read the book years ago.  It's possible to film, but it wasn't possible to do it in a way that was commercially viable.  This movie is the result of one of the most awkward efforts to film a book that I've seen.  First, they wanted a huge budget.  They wound up with around 200M.  Second, because of that budget, they needed a bankable star.  So they cast Brad Pitt.  Third, since they have a major star, they don't want to waste that.  They rewrote the story to center around him.
     This chain of events leads to a movie that only distantly has anything to do with the book.

     I think I'll start with where this movie went right.
     The opening act is really enjoyable.  We start off in Philadelphia, a traffic jam, an escape from the city, which is falling apart.  They stop by a grocery store.  Then we get to stay the night in an apartment building.  We get a nice, tense escape from that situation.  Right around that point, the movie starts to unravel.
     There are still some good sequences.  I actually liked the material in Jerusalem, and I found that much more interesting than the material around it.  And I suppose I liked the airplane stuff too.
     The dead are strange.  In some ways, I really liked the approach they used.  They're fast, but they don't seem to have any sense of self-preservation.  None of the dead get a personality, even less so than the infected get in 28 Days Later.  This does help to externalize the threat, and the hordes of dead we see are very intimidating.  The numbers, and the long shots of the dead running amok are effective in making things seem hopeless.

     But this leads me to one of the weirdest problems with this movie.  The dead are unintentionally hilarious.  They make a variety of noises, and many of them are birdlike.  It wasn't just me - other people would occasionally laugh at these.
      The plot is strange, in that the movie would actually be better without it.  Brad Pitt travels around the world to try to find an origin to the virus.  Then he observes some odd things about the dead's behavior, and comes up with a hypothesis.  This entire plot actually hurts the movie.  The longer it goes on, the more it makes me cringe.
     There are emotional moments that try to make Pitt and his family have some kind of arc.  It doesn't work, and it felt like wasted time.

     I still came out of this movie not as disappointed as I expected.  But it certainly doesn't end at the right point.
     Not especially worth it, especially in theaters.  Still, some very impressive overhead shots really make for some very scary images.