Director: Marc Forster

Starring: Brad Pitt, James Badge Dale, Fana Mokoena

“Every human being we save is one less zombie we have to kill”, claims Ludi Boeken’s Mossad leader, moments before everyone around him is indiscriminately killed by a rampaging river of the undead. Many people meet a similar fate in this not-even-slightly-similar adaptation of Max Brooks’ sombre and reserved novel, but is it enough to resurrect the notoriously cursed blockbuster from production hell?

Instead of picking up several years after the end of the war, as the novel does, this version plonks you straight into the lap of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), an ex-UN crisis investigator given the unenviable task of globetrotting through the zombie apocalypse in search of not only ‘patient zero’, but also a potential cure for the virus.

To say the pace of the film is ‘breakneck’ is tantamount to saying Adolf Hitler was ‘a bit of a git’ – It takes less than ten minutes for the whole world to turn to zombie infested shit, and after that it doesn’t stop truckin’ till the credits roll and your fingernails are considerably shorter than they were when you sat down. It’s perhaps best described as 28 Days Later by-way-of Roland Emmerich, providing all the rabid, frenetic energy of the former with the unfathomably huge scale of the latter, and surprisingly it works.

It succeeds most in it’s handling of tension, maintaining a constant feeling that Gerry and his cohorts are in drastic peril at all times. Sure, Most of it’s marquee, blockbuster moments are ruined by the trailer (like the swarming corpse-ladder piling up the walls of a fortified city), and it does make Pitt’s character appear as some sort of walking harbinger of doom, but they are still quite the spectacle to behold on the big screen.

It certainly isn’t without it’s faults though. Some especially ropey CGI, as well as a few instances of worryingly poor acting (mostly from those god-forsaken child actors), detracts from the sense of wide-eyed immersion the film otherwise nails, as does the distinct and noticeable lack of ANY gore.

Not one single person bites it (no pun intended) on camera, with most victims being simply tackled out of shot by the inexplicably fast and agile undead, and presumably meeting a satisfyingly grisly demise just inside our collective blind-spot. I’m not a gore-hound by any means, but attempting to deal with the global consequences of a zombie extinction event without showing a few shivering flaps of skin and a few drops of claret is hugely noticeable, especially for genre veterans.

Even a post-bite hand amputation is done just off camera, as if we can’t be trusted not to lose our minds when a bloodied, cleanly sliced stump pops up on the screen. This is only partially rectified by the ‘Unrated’ cut, which super-imposes appalling CGI arterial spray in a futile attempt to add a visceral element to the violence, but it only proves to further highlight the abandonment of practical effects.

Still, despite it’s irksome qualities, though, World War Z is a remarkably enjoyable movie to sit through; one that ignores many of the expected standards for a good zombie tale, but somehow still works anyway.

4/5