A zombie film without the gore, a family drama with little family. a sociopolitical thriller without the sociopolitcal...ness, "World War Z" tries to be a lot of things and succeeds at sort of being all of them.
Brad Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a former UN heavy who retired to spend time with his family but finds himself at the center of what the oncoming zombie apocalypse.
He uses his contacts in the government to score a place for him and his family on an aircraft carrier in the ocean (read: safe from the hungry jaws of the undead), but there's a price: He has to go find out how and when this plague started and, hopefully, find insights that will help end it.
So Gerry sets about globe-hopping, travelling to various locales to piece together clues that will unlock the mystery.
Where "Z" is at its most effective is in the middle of the zone. A scene where Gerry and his family are attempting to reach the roof of an apartment building they holed up in is a tense, frightening sequence with at least one great scare.
The zombie action here is, for the most part, tame and reliant on chases. There is little of the gore for which zombie movies are known, really to the film's detriment. Presumptively about how the rest of the world reacts to the zombie invasion (the biggest strength of the Max Brooks book from which the film takes its name), the film instead throws its chips into the Pitt basket by making him the focal point.
Instead, we get chaotic shots of zombies piling on each other to scale walls, topple buses and things of that nature. They're a plague of locusts and, as bad guys, have about as much personality. Yes, I know zombies by their nature aren't really supposed to be charismatic, but if you watch a Romero movie or "The Walking Dead," they at least offer monsters that show a hint of humanity through their clothing or the way they initially died. It brings an entirely new layer to zombies as monsters.
This may also be the first "serious" zombie movie to actually use the word "zombie." They do so awkwardly and it almost makes them sound silly, in all honesty.
The overall result is a decent-enough thriller, but not a very good zombie movie. These zombies are closer to "I Am Legend's" "vampires" than anything we have seen from Romero or "The Walking Dead"; they are fast-moving and largely CG.
The film's much-ballyhooed third act problems — which led to an entirely rewritten and reshot conclusion — are still somewhat problematic. Likewise, the film's ultimate conclusion is a bit out of left field, referenced in spots through the movie, but the ultimate connection arrives seemingly at random and leads to a rushed ending.
"World War Z" bears little resemblance to the book it's "based" on, which is a shame, but understandable given its subject matter. They turned a book with no main character into a serviceable-enough mid-tier Brad Pitt vehicle, which isn't as ambitious an adaptation as the book deserves.