World War Z (2013)

Zombies are not my usual cup of tea, but I have enough male friends who have put time and effort into refining their own ‘zombie plans’ to have half-formed one myself. What seems to bring these semi-regular discussions to a close, usually without resolution, is disagreement on the capabilities of the zombies we would be battling. One used to be able to out-run the things as they dragged useless limbs behind them at a snail’s pace, but apparently that is no longer the case. Why the nature of this potentially imminent undead foe should have changed, just because a few films have decided to up the anti, is not a question I feel like asking; mostly because I would have to listen to the response.

Not being particularly inclined to discuss them, I have no great desire to watch films about them. An exception I will make is Zombieland, which is humourous enough for me to enjoy, zombies-and-all. It also provides me with ready made rules for surviving any similar apocalypse so that I don’t have to think of them myself. Thus I am spared from succumbing to a terrible zombie death by a simple failure to ‘check the backseat’ or by forgetting to employ the ‘double-tap’.

Despite a general dislike for the genre, I went to see World War Z at the cinema, and found it was really rather good. That’s not to say I enjoyed it all – I don’t go for panic-attack inducing films all that much, which is why any horror I watch tends to lean to the gory or creepy (Saw, Let the Right One In), rather than the jumpy. World War Z definitely makes you jump, and the luxury of 3D makes the jumps that much bigger.

What World War Z did manage, was to make me believe that this is what might actually happen, were such a horrific disease to develop (it seems always to be caused by a disease these days). Everything’s fine one minute and then boom! Zombies everywhere. These were particularly fast acting zombies mind, 12 seconds from bite to zombie and full sprinting ability. That doesn’t take long to spread. It shows military responses and emergency roof-top evacuations; loss of cities or even whole countries to the evil undead enemy. Survival seems to be down to a combination of not just what you know, but who you know. So I’m dead then.

World War Z primarily follows Brad Pitt and his family as they attempt to leave a hugely congested and increasingly zombie-ridden city and get to safety. As an ex-UN employee Pitt naturally ends up the hero, flying around the world to discover the source of the zombie disease, and attempting to find a cure. Thus we see zombie battles in many different environments which removed any of the tedious repetition that is almost a certainty with a theme so simple yet repeated so many times. That said, the standard supermarket scene with looting and fending off rampant zombies is very much present.

Both the highlight, and for me the least enjoyable scene, is the end where Pitt the hero deliberately faces the zombies head on, in the final push for that elusive cure. Quietly sneaking past zombie after zombie with very little in the way of protection or weaponry you want to hold your breath to prevent any noise from revealing his presence to the unsuspecting zombies that surround him. When I say it was the least enjoyable, I just mean for me. It’s amazing; I’m just of a nervous disposition apparently. During this time we see some good zombie close-ups and can study their mannerisms. Once dormant (if deprived of humans for a while), there’s a lot of twitching and shuddering and moping about, rather than the full attacking sprint that we see during the rest of the film. It’s creepy and terrifying, but hugely fascinating and for that reason too you’re willing them to remain dormant and unaware of a healthy human’s presence.

From this, I assume they can’t smell. I don’t know if that’s a tactic commonly used by zombies – the ability to smell healthy people but I suppose that would put pain to any chance of sneaking past. Let’s hope it’s not something I ever have to consider.

The only drawback was a slight comic aspect to the twitching (if you choose to see it), which reminded me of the guy in the Rowntree’s Rip’ems advert – the one dressed up as the blue bird. Unfortunately that advert was played in the cinema just before the film, otherwise maybe I wouldn’t have made the connection.