I do not deal well with Horror Films. I’m the person that cowers, shrinks in their seat and covers their eyes the minute my ‘someone’s about to die horrifically on screen,’ sense starts tingling. I jump at all the embarrassingly predictable surprise deaths and take a tactical toilet trip if the tension has become unbearable. Naturally, World War Z knocked me for six.
Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a retired United Nations employee, caught in the initial outbreak of the zombie epidemic in the United States, is forced into a quest to find a cure for a zombie-like epidemic that has spread across the world. To ensure his family’s safety onboard one of the ships of the Naval Fleet hosting the tattered remnants of the UN, he agrees to become a bodyguard of sorts for a professor leading an expedition to find a cure for the epidemic.
Unfortunately, the only hope of humanity trips and kills himself with his own gun in a zombie ambush in Korea, and Lane travels to Israel, believing that Mossad received early-warning of the epidemic somehow, enabling them to fortify Jerusalem ten days before the outbreak. In a run of bad luck, the Israelis inexplicably miss a swarm of zombies charging toward the wall until they’ve broken over the top and Lane barely makes it onto the last flight out of Jerusalem alive. In a bizarre, and likely money-saving twist, he diverts the plane to Cardiff, survives a crash-landing caused by setting of a grenade in the cabin, and arrives at a World Health Organisation facility to develop a vaccine. Weirder still, Lane deduces that the zombies avoid weakness and therefore injects himself with a lethal but curable disease to camouflage himself against the zombies. Miraculously the cure works, and a succinct montage shows how, though the world is not saved instantly, it will be soon.
Though World War Z can deliver terror, it is entirely generic and unlikely to really shock anyone. Pitt delivered a monotone performance and overshadowed the screen time of everyone else, stopping the formation of any attachment to any character throughout the film. Though the shots of Philadelphia and Jerusalem descending into chaos echoed the global scope of the epidemic, and stock news footage and shots of zombies beside famous landmarks enhanced the scale of the film, the film failed to deliver anything inspiring on the small-scale level. It was entirely superficial. There were explosions, close-ups of the zombies and more shock-inducing surprise zombie attacks than a normal person’s bladder can handle, but that’s only to be expected in an action thriller. There was even the box-ticking gesture of vomit-inducing selflessness as Lane injected himself with a lethal virus to save humanity. The only real surprise was the lack of a single zombie threatening to eat someone’s brains, although I came away with the distinct impression that that could well have been a suggestion at the planning meeting.