BEFORE: More zombies tonight, the Halloween horror chain is sort of spilling into November, and I'm back on track for sort of an end-of-the-world pandemic thing. Which is quite timely considering all the ebola news - I swear it's all a coincidence. I planned months ago to be exactly where I am now in the chain, I'm not tying in with headline news intentionally.
Linking from "Warm Bodies", John Malkovich was also in "Burn After Reading" with Brad Pitt (last seen in "Killing Them Softly"). Simple as that.
AFTER: This film definitely treats Zombie-ism as a disease, like a virus - only instead of producing flu-like symptoms and bleeding out of every orifice, it's a virus that makes people into brain-dead flesh eaters, with an incubation period of about 10-12 seconds. Usually these days something going "viral" is a good thing, at least where promotion is concerned, but with the taste for human flesh, not so much. And these aren't your regular, lumbering, stupid zombies - these things move FAST and appear to have sort of a hive mind mentality, which means they can work together to cover more ground and spread the virus more quickly.
I'm sure that there are many people hard at work on ebola treatments and possible anti-virals - top men, so to speak. But in the movies it takes only ONE man to make a difference, and that man happens to look like Brad Pitt. And he's not a virologist, or even a doctor, he's....wait, what are his credentials again? Oh, right, he likes to travel, he's good with a gun OR a hatchet, and he's not afraid to take weird, stupid risks if that's what it takes to come up with an answer to the zombie virus. (We're assuming that there even IS an answer, which is a big leap in logic, if you ask me.)
He's supposed to be retired and not involved in the world-saving anymore ("I'm not even supposed to BE here today...") BUT, with zombies attacking his wife and daughters, he's willing to jump back into the fray and risk being eaten or zombiefied if it means that his family will be kept safe. This sort of calls to mind another film, "2012", with main characters jumping from point to point around the globe, looking for a safe haven. Pitt's character goes from New Jersey to Korea to Jerusalem in his quest for answers, and the zombies are hot on his heels, no matter where he goes. (Are we sure they're not just tracking him because he looks so tasty?)
Like "Warm Bodies", this film is very short on details about how the whole zombie plague thing started in the first place - but here that's sort of justified, since they're looking for a cure and part of finding that cure is figuring out how and where it began. There's an opening montage that references everything from global warming to pollution to the collapse of bee colonies so, umm, you do the math. The answer must be in there somewhere, right?
There's a HUGE coincidence near the end, I won't spoil it. Actually, THEM, there are a number of outlandish contrivances near the end, as if someone realized that the movie was running long and we better start summing things up, so look, don't ask how this character ended up exactly where he needed to be, just take it as written, OK? Then it's a BIG leap in logic to come up with a solution to "How not to get eaten by a zombie", and if you believe the ends justify the means, then the fact that it works is enough to allow it to take place. Me, I prefer to see how we get from Point A to Point B without guesswork.
Also, call me old-fashioned, but I believe that a movie should have a beginning, a middle and an end. By glossing over the origin of the zombie plague, and presenting an aftermath that feels more like an afterthought, this film is nearly all middle, from start to finish. Does that make sense?
EDIT: I just can't let this film's "solution" to the zombie plague go. Allow me to illustrate my beef with an analogy - this weekend, I changed the batteries in our thermostat when I set the clocks back an hour. To do this, I needed to lift the device off the wall, and when I did, I noticed 9 small pins on the base that corresponded to holes on the control panel - only one of them was bent and wasn't going where it looked like it was supposed to go, so I bent it back into position. Somehow this made the whole device stop working, and a day later the house was freezing. We checked the pilot light, I checked the thermostat programming, even tried to set the temperature to 75 degrees just to kick-start it. Nothing.
I figured the only thing I'd changed was that bent pin, so today I lifted the control panel off the wall again, bent the straight pin back to the odd angle it was at before, and replaced the device. Whhooossh! The furnace kicked in, the heat came on, and I apparently fixed what I'd broken when I tried to "fix" it the day before. This was a silly, stupid, counter-intuitive solution. It shouldn't have worked, but it did, so I have to just shrug it off, because I'm not a heating technician. But in this I find a similarity to the zombie "solution" displayed in "World War Z", and since I'm guessing a zombie virus is about 100 times more complicated than my thermostat, it's also about 100 times sillier and stupider as a solution.
Also starring Mireille Enos, Fana Mokoena, Ludi Boeken, Peter Capaldi, David Morse (last seen in "Hearts in Atlantis"), Ruth Negga, Daniella Kertesz, with a cameo from Matthew Fox.
RATING: 5 out of 10 satellite phones
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