“Despite my initial reticence, when you take “World War Z” on its own terms, and accept that its not going to follow the novel, you’ll have a good time.”

I must admit that going into Marc Forster’s “World War Z,” my expectations were somewhat low.  I mean, how can you have a half-decent zombie film when virtually all your zombies are computer-generated?  And I won’t even go into any detail – mainly because I have already in prior posts – about the cost overruns and other problems that supposedly plagued the production.

First off, I have to admit that I enjoyed this movie.  Sure, it could have been a bit shorter – Forster has an odd tendency to place importance on shots that would have been better off left on the editing room floor – and it could have attempted to follow Max Brooks’ novel a bit more closely, but for what it was, it worked.

In fact, the greatest problem with “World War Z” can be summed up in two words.

Brad.  Pitt.

His performance wasn’t the issue – I thought that he acquitted himself well, and he played his part with honesty and conviction – No.  The problem is that Pitt is one of the biggest stars on the planet, and there’s no way that you can have a film that he stars in (as well as produces) where he’s not going to be front and center.

This means that the film is going to be built around him, which is another way of saying that you can forget the structure of the novel the film is based on.

Another problem is that the zombies aren’t George Romero-type zombies (slow, lumbering and easy to outrun) but instead Zach Snyder-type zombies (improbably fast, more like rabid animals that traditional zombies).

The difficulty with such an approach is that the more traditional zombies rely on their numbers to build suspense and tension, while the faster variety, while initially scarier, actually aren’t all that interesting because you’re removing what makes the zombie so scary in the first place, which is the idea that they are inexorably going to win, partially because of overwhelming numbers, partially because at some point we are potentially going to add to their ranks.

An interesting twist that Forster brings is that his monsters have a sort of hive mentality, so that they are able to do things more traditional zombies can’t, such as use their sheer numerical superiority to create, essentially, ladders of the undead, which they can use to scale huge walls, or even bring down a chopper.

It’s visually interesting idea, but it lacks any sense of the personal and immediacy of more traditional interpretations.

Though I suspect that most people who see “World War Z” will have no idea about Romero or Snyder-type zombies, and will see the film to see how Brad Pitt almost single-handedly saves the human race from a zombie outbreak,

And if they do, that’s OK.