Not that any makeshift solution lasts for long in “World War Z,” whose undead prove terrifyingly hardy and lightning-quick, sprinting into spastic action when they sense fresh meat is near and turning their victims into fellow travelers in a matter of seconds. descends into chaos pretty early on, while the two nations best equipped for the coming onslaught turn out to be Israel and North Korea - the former by building an enormous wall, the latter by extracting the teeth of its entire population. In what may be taken as an affront by the America First crowd, the old U.S.
Significantly expanding the claustrophobic geography of most zombie pics, the aptly titled “World War Z” doesn’t have a particular polemical axe to grind so much as it seeks to imagine how the world’s ideologically disparate peoples and governments would respond if great masses of the populi did suddenly turn into rabid, flesh-eating beasties. occupation of Haiti (1932’s Bela Lugosi starrer “White Zombie”) to the upheaval of the Vietnam/civil rights era (“Night of the Living Dead”) and the bio-panics of the late 20th century (“28 Days Later,” “Resident Evil”). Showing few visible signs of the massive rewrites, reshoots and other post-production patchwork that delayed its release from December 2012, this sleekly crafted, often nail-biting tale of global zombiepocalypse clicks on both visceral and emotional levels, resulting in an unusually serious-minded summer entertainment whose ideal audience might be described as comicbook fanboys who also listen to “Democracy Now.” Opening a week apart from the more four-quadrant-friendly “Man of Steel” in most markets, “ World War Z” should post solid enough numbers at home and abroad, but with a rumored final cost well north of $200 million, it’ll need more than a bit of kryptonite up its sleeve to push far into profitability.Ī flexible metaphor for all manner of social, cultural and political maladies, the zombie genre has, over the decades, been employed as an analogue for everything from the U.S. Rising from an early grave of negative pre-release publicity, director Marc Forster and producer-star Brad Pitt’s much-maligned “World War Z” emerges as a surprisingly smart, gripping and imaginative addition to the zombie-movie canon, owing as much to scientific disaster movies like “The China Syndrome” and “ Contagion” as it does to undead ur-texts like the collected works of George Romero.
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