If there’s one thing that World War Z
does well that no other zombie movie does right, it’s that it manages to
capture the shear scale and insanity of an initial zombie outbreak. It neither
relies it’s main character waking up in medias res like in Walking dead or 28
Days Later—one of the few things I dislike about both—nor does it just leave
it’s audience to assume that the world has been overrun like in most all zombie
apocalypse movies before it save maybe 28 Weeks later. We hear the news reports
of chaos breaking out all over the world and just like the trailer shows us, we
see the chaos the initial outbreak
causes. And we also see get to see the rest of the world go to hell in a hand-basket.
I suppose this is one advantage to zombie being so damned popular is getting to
see a movie where all we get to see all this. The sequences in Israel and the
one on the plane have to be two of my favorite zombie scenes put to celluloid,
if only because I knew exactly what song they were playing in the former.
That being said, this intensity kind
of works against it. While the aforementioned in medias res approach to both
Walking Dead and 28 Days are sort of a copout, they were necessary so that we
the viewer get to see the harsh, unrelenting reality of living both with the
threat of the undead but also that of the living pushed to the brink. World War
Z loses this emotional punch beneath the crazy chase sequences and scientific
accuracy.
While I’m at it, I’ll add a few last
minute nit-picks: some of the sound effects sound a little too “trailery”, the
various booms and bwa-wa-wa’s sounding a bit like something out of Inception.
Not to mention the final sequence at the end feels a little lack-luster in
comparison to the majority of the scenes before it, making it feel a bit
anti-climactic.
TL;DR
While it lacks the emotional punch of
either Walking Dead or 28 Days Later (the latter my favorite zombie movie to
date) it makes up for it with it’s intensity and sheer scale. I say give it a
look, if only for that one Israel scene.
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