‘World War Z’

World War Z is a series of action vignettes held together by worn duct tape and the crummiest post-converted 3D since Clash of the Titans.  It purports to be based on the remarkable book of the same name by Max Brooks, but it contorts the notions of “adaptation” and “source material” beyond recognition.

Brooks’ novel chronicled a worldwide zombie uprising from the perspectives of various characters in different parts of the world dealing with different aspects of the crisis in different ways. It was obsessed with the logistics and rules of a zombie war: how exactly did the infection spread so quickly across borders and oceans? What precisely are the implications of the fact that zombies freeze in the cold? The story did not focus on action or character or even plot, in any conventional sense; it was built around questions like these.

The film “adaptation,” by contrast, studiously ignores them – and doesn’t really have anything else in common with the book, either. Shepherded by Mark Forster through a now infamously troubled production, it borrows the concept of a sudden worldwide zombie epidemic, and the globehopping structure. But instead of giving us various accounts of different aspects of the crisis, it simply sends an invented protagonist (a retired UN field agent of some sort, named Gerry and played by Brad Pitt) on an ill-defined mission to stop it. From an aircraft carrier off the coast of New Jersey, he flies to South Korea, then Jerusalem, then onward, with each stop featuring some sort of zombie action centerpiece – and some flimsy excuse to send Gerry to his next destination.

This feels very much like what it is:  a bunch of set pieces with almost no connective tissue.  The baddies are generic, with 28 Days Later having scooped the film on zombies that can run fast, and with plenty of better films having toyed with the idea of overwhelmingly massive zombie hordes. There’s no narrative drive, no mystery to solve:  the screenplay teases us with a hunt for “patient zero,” but quickly gets bored and moves on to something else. At one point, it turns out that the Israelis saw the invasion coming and quickly built a wall to keep the zombies out; Gerry asks how they knew, and is told (in a very long expository scene that conveys almost nothing) that they intercepted a cable with the word “zombie” in it. It’s almost funny how little meat the film has on its bones.

The action looks like it cost a lot of money, but World War Z ruins that too, with a phenomenally bad and misguided 3D post-conversion. 3D-bashing is an old game, and I thought I had moved past it:  after early hiccups, most notoriously with Clash of the Titans, Hollywood had seemed to get the hang of the technology. (Another recent high-profile post-conversion, Man of Steel, looked pretty good.) World War Z is a major leap backward. The separation between background and foreground here is harsh and artificial, inducing a headache and making it impossible to focus on the entire frame. Frenetic shaky-cam cinematography, meant to lend the action an immediacy, looks simply terrible, and certain scenes (most notably a chase sequence in an apartment building staircase) are indecipherable as a result. In two dimensions, the film might be a better experience; in three, it is physically unpleasant to endure.

The third act of the film was completely reshot after a vast, expensive Moscow-set climax tested poorly. In a kind of hilarious cut-and-paste (hard to explain out of context, but watch for the splice right after the plane crash), it’s been replaced by a quieter, more horror-tinged conclusion written by current Hollywood wunderkinds Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard. It’s based on an arbitrary idea, but it’s at least well-lit and coherent. I’m not sure why it cost a reported extra $200 million to bring it about.

Despite its ballooning budget, World War Z will probably ride to a profit on the shoulders of international superstar Brad Pitt, who gives a perfectly fine performance and finally has enough grey in his beard to be able to look at a twentysomething virologist who’s supposed to save the world and credibly bark that “he’s just a kid.” But the film is one of those useless big-budget tentpoles that’s been focus-grouped and assembled out of marketable parts; it’s about nothing and it’s nobody’s vision. Don’t bother with it.

Grade: C-