Z is For Zzzz

Zombie hordes on mass transit in World War Z.

««World War Z. Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on a novel by Max Brooks. Directed by Marc Forster. At Regal Cinemas.

If you want to know why you shouldn't worry about a real zombie apocalypse, think of it from an evolutionary point of view. Zombies are usually presented as "undead"—animated corpses. But if it is really possible to run a human-sized body without such expensive features as a circulatory system, immune system, digestion, etc., wouldn't Mother Nature have evolved zombie creatures already? Seems like a lot of bother, having a beating heart, seeking food, drinking water—in short, being alive—when none of that is strictly necessary, yes? (Stories about living people infected with "zombie" viruses, as in 28 Hours Later and I Am Legend, are exempt from this objection…but not from others.) 

          These were the kinds of thoughts that occurred to me while I watched Marc Forster's zombie-war epic World War Z. In short, my mind wandered, because it was not much compelled by what was on the screen. You might even say it shuffled along aimlessly, leaving brain-droppings like a zombie shedding body parts.

          For those who haven't heard, WWZ is a mash-up of at least three genres: zombie horror plus race-against-contagion forensic investigation story (e.g. Andromeda Strain, Contagion) plus combat movie. Brad Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, an investigation jack-of-all-trades for the UN, who trades his forensic services for the privilege to keep his wife (The Killing's Mireille Enos) and kids safe from the zombie hordes. In search of the source of the virus, Lane travels from Korea to Israel to Wales in a prop-driven C-130 aircraft—a painfully slow (<400 mph) way to circle the globe, given that the humanity is in a death-race for its very existence. Fortunately, his plane (normal range: 1000 miles) only has to refuel once in his 20,000-mile odyssey.
          But whatever. WWZ real problem is that it is a $200 million mega-epic that produces no more chills and thrills than far smaller, humbler zombie flicks. For those extra millions, we get a glimpse at the planetary-scale mayhem that low-budget flicks usually consign to fake news reports—human waves of the undead swarming over cities, overwhelming all resistance. Seems the only countries that hold off the plague are North Korea (because they've removed the teeth of every citizen) and Israel, because of its vaunted security wall. When Lane arrives in the latter we get the film's most eye-popping spectacle: thousands of (presumably Palestinian) zombies dog-piling to the top of the wall, blissfully oblivious to the Israelis' superior firepower. It's a scene we suspect won't make it into the version of WWZ shown in Jerusalem, for fear of giving the Arabs ideas.

          But it's not nearly enough. A big part of the problem is that Brad Pitt, a not-untalented actor, is given virtually nothing to play here. He's just the dutiful father and good soldier in emergency mode. Nor is Enos, who has a unique look and plenty of chops of her own, given much to do other than fret and wait.

          From the moment George Romero reinvented the zombie horror genre in 1968's Night of the Living Dead, his zombies weren't meant to be just monsters. They were metaphors. As played out in Romero's subsequent films, and some of the more intelligent ones by others, the real subject was not soulless people, but the society that makes them soulless. In corporate bastardizations like WWZ, the system is never the problem, and all those plague victims are cockroaches, fit only for stomping. Indeed, there's a shot late in the film of massive piles of zombie bodies being triumphantly incinerated—a spectacle that, with just a small tweak of political context, might have pleased Heinrich Himmler.

          Not that WWZ is a fascist film. It's just too soulless for that.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro