Why WORLD WAR Z Is More Nuanced Than You Realized

I’m honestly not much of a horror fan, especially the ghosts I cannot handle (nor the high-pitched violin shrieking and shots that give me heart attacks). Zombies are something else, though. I’m pretty good with the blood and gore and they’re generally not too scary. Especially the kind in The Walking Dead, the slow, relatively friendly yet cannibalistic kind (you’ll find some more comparisons to The Walking Dead in this review so be warned).

That’s not the kind of zombie you’re confronted with in World War Z. In this movie, the zombies have come from a sort virus akin to rabies, and surely, the zombies are like rabid dogs. They’re fast, extremely aggressive (slamming their heads against windows hard  to get to you), they fling themselves at you with such speed and strength they take you down about half a block. They didn’t seem to pull out your organs and eat them though. Instead, their only purpose was to spread the disease and man, were they efficient. Within hours, the entire planet was zombified.

Cue Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), who barely escapes the fray with his family. Apparently, he’s some kind of important guy, as a chopper is sent to retrieve him. Once safely flown to a aircraft carrier, far away from shore, it appears he’s a retired field agent for the United Nations, but as he’s one of their best and only left, he’s sent into the field to retrieve intel on the disease.

For Once, It’s About the World, Not Just the United States

In my review on Olympus Has Fallen, I raged on this. And I’ve raged about it many, many times before while watching movies. I sometimes have a hard time forgiving Hollywood for it’s perpetual focus on the U.S.. In my opinion, movies can be so much better when they show more of the world than just the one location  (and there are many much more interesting settings than the U.S.). That’s one of my major issues with The Walking Dead, too. How much better would that show have been if we’d been shown more of the rest of the world, right?

That is exactly what World War Z gets right. Gerry’s shipped off (though involuntarily – if he doesn’t do it, his family can’t stay on the ship) to South Korea right away. His mission is to find the source and possibly the cure to the zombie disease. I, in my rage and expecting terrible clichés, immediately shouted: you’ll see! The North Korean’s are the source! North Korea is always the source of evil! To my pleasant surprise, it wasn’t the North Koreans, or the South Koreans for that matter. Gerry doesn’t actually find all that much here. He ends up having to fly to Jerusalem, as oddly, they closed the gates to their city a few days before the onslaught began, which is major cause for suspicion.

This was the moment I started to have actual faith in this movie. It would be quite a political statement if they would portray the Israeli to be the bad guys. Instead though, they were shown to let (healthy) people enter their borders, to grant them safety inside their walled city. Unfortunately though, those walls prove to be not much of a challenge for the crazed zombies and the city is quickly overrun with them. In his haste to leave the city, Gerry meets the female Israeli soldier, Segen (Daniella Kertesz, an Israeli herself).

A Female Soldier That’s Kick-ass Just Because She Is

Segen, which literally means lieutenant in Hebrew, is bitten, and without  a second of  doubt, Gerry chops off her arm. With this, he proves the bite doesn’t necessarily infect someone, as long as you’re fast enough – Segen is now important for Gerry’s mission, and he takes her. Unfortunately, his private U.N. plane has already left (can’t blame the pilot), so instead, he boards a Belarus Air plane. There, he treats Segen’s wound.

Segen shows to be a pretty great character. She doesn’t have many lines, but she doesn’t need them. She radiates some sort of natural coolness, exactly like how a male soldier is usually portrayed. There is nothing sexy about her, with her shaved head and plain face. She is what I imagine real Israeli female soldiers look like (FYI: Israel is the only country in the world where the military service is also mandatory for women) – she looks like a real woman, not sexed up as they so often are in movies. Segen is authoritative and knows her shit, and thankfully, there was no need for any romance. I found Segen to be a very nuanced character and to put such a refined character down properly, this required some acting skill from Daniella Kertesz.

Great Pacing

This movie was nothing if not extremely tense. It went from one enthralling scene to the next. In the plane, Gerry and Segen experience a moment of peace. Gerry communicates their destination with the pilots of the plane, which now is the World Health Organization in Wales, as he thought he was on to something. Unfortunately though, the plane crashes before they get there; a zombie had apparently gotten into the plane’s cargo hold, and made its grand entrance into the passenger area, infecting everyone within minutes.

Apparently, the plane was already near Wales, as Segen and Gerry both survive the crash and make their way to the W.H.O. facility, badly hurt and on foot, so it couldn’t have been too far away. That was a bit of a too big coincidence for me.  Nevertheless, they make it, and while they’re first greeted like arch enemies (a bit unnecessary as I see it), once the leader gets the U.N. on the line, they soften, and try to help Gerry. By the way, it was fun to see Moritz Bleibtreu among the W.H.O. doctors, a famous German actor.

This is where I’ll stop recounting the story, as I don’t want to spoil it all for you. On a final note, I want to say that I found the ending quite a bit disappointing. I saw the “cut” version of the movie, apparently there was also a version where Gerry ends up in the Russian army, where he has to fight the zombies until the end of days with little hope. The masochist inside of me prefers dark endings, though probably it would have fared less well that way, as happy endings usually tend to do better. Oh well.

Spitting Blood and Snapping Teeth

Nevertheless, I liked about World War Z that it shows the zombie apocalypse on a global level, as it added so many interesting layers to the story. I liked Brad Pitt‘s performance, he portrayed Gerry exactly like I would imagine a U.N. field agent to be: gritty, smart, well-traveled and knowledgeable about the world, although at times, he also was a bit flat on the emotional level. I enjoyed the wit of the character most. I mean, how often have you seen the characters of The Walking Dead covered in zombie blood, spitting it out, not once worrying whether they might turn? In one of Gerry’s very first close-combat encounters, he runs off and when at a safe distance from his family, he counts the time it takes before one turns into a zombie. That’s what I’d do, too.

All in all, I liked World War Z. I liked the rabid zombies with their snapping teeth, they were horrifying. I enjoyed the cinematography, I liked the grand overviews of, for instance, the city of Jerusalem. I liked the grittiness of the lighting as well as the high contrast. Also, the general direction of Marc Forster seemed pretty tight.

Though I haven’t read the book it was based on (by Max Brooks) – on its own, for the movie, I thought the story was constructed pretty well, despite it being rewritten a dozen times. The characters especially seemed solid, and from what I read, I’m glad they removed certain aspects of the movie’s story which would only have muddled the story (like the plot line where Gerry’s wife would have an affair with some random parajumper).

Honestly, after this movie, I’m very interested to read the book – supposedly it recounts the political affairs more instead of the action, and I have to admit that at first this sounded boring to me, but after having seen the movie, it sounds fascinating, as it puts the zombie apocalypse on a global level. I put it on my to read list.

What do you think of the global scope of World War Z? Do you think it added to the story, or did it just convolute it?

Many said the filmmakers or World War Z didn’t do well transferring the book to the screen. But why should the movie always exactly recount the book? Can’t a movie add to the story, too? Like the Bond movies have done forever?