Marc Forster (2013)

Gerry Lane, who used to work for the UN but is now a house husband, drives his wife and daughters to work and school in Philadelphia.  The Lanes are stuck in a traffic jam but there’s more going on here than the rush hour:  the city is under attack from zombies, in great number.  I was taken by the bits from this traffic jam sequence in the trailer for World War Z.  Edward Lawrenson and David Denby both commended the movie, Denby reckoning it much superior to other digitised apocalypse blockbusters he’d seen recently.  Not my sort of film, as Sally repeatedly says, but I thought I should try top of the range.  That scene in the Philadelphia thoroughfare is well staged.  What has preceded it is good too – a montage of clips from various television channels that morning (the diet of images is recognisable although their effect is definitely ominous), breakfast at the Lanes’ home.  But that street sequence is less than ten minutes into the movie and what happens from this point onwards seems to happen in a desperate rush.  There is a rationale for that:  the first zombie attack appears to be quite unexpected and, it quickly emerges, has been replicated around the globe with devastating consequences in many major cities.  There’s no time for the Lanes to reflect on how this terrifying new world came about:  they just have to survive.  But you sense too that never-taking-your-foot-off-the-gas is de rigueur for film-makers working in this genre:  you can’t afford (it obviously is a financial imperative) to let the audience get bored.  So the human scenes in World War Z are perfunctory and if a person dominates a scene the actor concerned seems to be doing too much and not to know their place.   (I admit that this struck me in a sequence featuring James Badge Dale and the odds are that he was doing too much anyway.)

Once Gerry Lane agrees, for the sake of humanity, to return to the UN (which he left in controversial circumstances), the movie embarks on an international tour, although its ports of call are not as A-list as the $190m budget for World War Z might suggest – South Korea, Israel, Wales.  There’s a big zombie attack in each place.  The one in Jerusalem is the most striking, where a miles-high protective wall was built shortly before the invasion began.  The hordes of zombies scrabbling up and pouring over the wall into what had been a safe zone is a startling image – although partly, I think, because the Jewish connection unfortunately links it in your mind to newsreel of mounds of corpses in Nazi concentration camps.  It wasn’t clear to me how Israeli security agencies could have been slack enough to be taken unawares by this particular zombie onslaught since they’d been smart enough to build the wall in good time.  I didn’t get either why, when they built the wall, they didn’t tip the wink to their American allies but I’m sure there was plenty of plotting in World War Z that I misunderstood.   Much of the dialogue is hard to make out although things improve in the relative quiet of the WHO facility nestling under Welsh mountains.

The  housing estate in Wales through which Gerry and a female Israeli soldier head towards the WHO labs was of course the closest to my experience:  if the film were really strong I think that’s where it would have had most power for me.  In fact, it seemed nearly comical that the story had touched down in a British suburban street – because the two people walking down the street were the only two survivors of a plane crash and the only two people who meant anything to the audience and whose survival therefore mattered.  That’s how old Hollywood the movie is:  it’s only superficially modern, with its God’s-eye view shots of CGI insect-sized humanity and its larger visual scheme and movement.  Perhaps the difference between the zombie menace here and in Hollywood movies of a different era is that the threat in World War Z isn’t a paranoid political metaphor – its context is rather the fear of apocalypse in an era of global terrorism and environmental unease.   Although the picture’s conclusion is hopeful rather than triumphant, its reassuring message seems to be that the threat can be overcome by a combination of science and American heroism.  It also makes clear that a sequel is on the cards if the film pays its way (and it has done):  Gerry opines that ‘This isn’t the end. Not even close.’

Brad Pitt is a big advantage to World War Z.  Seeing what he could do in Moneyball has changed my mind about him:  he’s not a great actor but I look forward to watching him now.  In that early scene when Gerry’s making breakfast, Pitt is very good at showing that he loves his family but misses his job.  (As in Moneyball, he interacts well with children.)  Gerry’s wife is played by Mireille Enos, who leaves me cold; she has a solemn, condescending quality which is arguably an expression of the character but which I think, after seeing Enos in Gangster Squad too, may be a quality in the actress.  She comes over as a cross between Julianne Moore and Orla Guerin – not a winning combination.  The cast also includes Daniella Kertesz as the aforementioned Israeli soldier, Fana Mokoena as the UN Deputy Secretary-General and David Morse as a disgraced former CIA operative.   The appearance of Peter Capaldi in the WHO lab reinforces the temptation to laugh during this episode although when Gerry’s plan to save humanity is shown to work (he’s sussed that the zombies don’t attack people who are already sick or injured), Capaldi’s reaction delivers a bit of human impact.  Marco Beltrami’s score includes a rather effective Tubular Bells-like refrain.  I wonder if Marc Forster, when he made Finding Neverland in 2004, expected to follow up with James Bond (Quantum of Solace) and zombie movies.

14 July 2013