World War Z

6

ClariseSamuelsJul 21, 2013

This movie has a lot of entertainment appeal--Brad Pitt is always impressively handsome, having grown out the crew cut that he wore for years when he was married to Jennifer Aniston. Now he's gone to the other extreme, where his blonde locksThis movie has a lot of entertainment appeal--Brad Pitt is always impressively handsome, having grown out the crew cut that he wore for years when he was married to Jennifer Aniston. Now he's gone to the other extreme, where his blonde locks hang down to his shoulders, and he is even a model for Chanel No. 5. From the buzz cut that detracted from his looks to the long locks that make him look like a romantic Lancelot, Pitt has found a middle-aged role for himself as husband (practically) to Angelina Jolie and father of their six children.

This new persona shines through in World War Z, a movie that holds your interest in spite of the formulaic presentation. There is a contagion that is spreading quickly, and at first it appears to be a typical superbug, but this one is different. It is in fact a zombie contagion, and anyone who gets bitten is quickly infected and turns into a zombie within twelve seconds. This is a fairly typical fear-based disaster movie, but Pitt's character Gerry Lane is so strong, protective, and good-looking that fans will be mesmerized just because they love Brad Pitt.

The suspense is masterful, even though the gorier aspects of the genre have been thankfully toned down. The zombies are ugly and scary, but they never mutilate or devour, although they act as though they are about to. They are simply very bad-tempered, they destroy property, and they bite people. With the virus spreading like wildfire, there is a real chance that the entire human race is doomed to this fate. There is no sex in this film, for Gerry is deeply in love with his wife Karin, played by Mireille Enos, who looks like a red-headed Jolie, and who has to separate from Gerry early in the film. (They only share scenes at the beginning and very end of the film.) As in real life, Pitt's character is a devoted husband and father. No one can seduce him, not even when he becomes attached to a female soldier named Segen, who serves in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and who for some strange reason is sporting a shaven head. (Female IDF soldiers, unlike their male counterparts, are not required to cut their hair for military service, so this unusual attribute seems to announce up front that Segen is not a love interest.) The movie gets extra points for avoiding foul language. I counted only two instances of “Godd*mn,” and then only when Gerry was facing almost insurmountable obstacles, and one instance of the English equivalent of the French expletive, merde. The f-bomb is never dropped. For Hollywood, this alone is an almost impossible feat. Bravo.

Pitt's Gerry may be a family man, but he's no namby-pamby. A former U.N. Operative, he is about to save the world single-handedly, using his wits and his formidable powers of observation. Gerry is a hero, and a faithful one at that, for the affection he develops for Segen is such that he should have had an affair with her, even with her buzz cut, but he doesn't. To make that even clearer, at one point he has to chop off her bitten hand to save her from the virus. If they were going to have an affair, that pretty much finished it off.

There is a lot of talk about how the ending was changed. The original synopsis is on the Internet, and far from having a different ending, the original screenplay was pretty much thrown out. This version is a completely different film starting from the escape from Jerusalem. In this version, after escaping from Jerusalem, Gerry and Segen survive an unsurvivable plane crash, and then they conveniently find themselves walking distance from the W.H.O. lab that they need to visit to find a cure for the virus. The cure is based on a clever theory devised by Gerry after he has made shrewd observations about zombie behavior. The ending is somewhat reminiscent of the vampire film, Daybreakers, starring Ethan Hawke, a film where the quest to save humanity from being completely converted to vampirism was less formulaic and more inventive than what we have here in World War Z.… Expand