World War Z

3 Stars (out of four)

This movie was tough for me.  It was an exercise in managing expectations.  I was a latecomer to the party for Max Brooks' seminal book on the zombie apocalypse.  I actually broke my own rule of not reading a book before I see the movie, because I am inevitably disappointed. The only time I liked the movie adaptation of a dense book was The Lord of the Rings.  The Lord of the Rings was exhibit A on how to adapt a very layered story filled with way too much purple prose.  Once I read World War Z, I became one of the teeming millions who immediately loved the story.  The problem is that the story, like Lord of the Rings, is very dense with an epic scope.  I honestly did not know how they would be able to do the story justice in 2-3 hours.  It felt it would make a great HBO miniseries, but a movie?  Never.

I was really apprehensive, but i shouldn't have been.  When I saw the writers in the credits, who included some of the best comic book writers and scriptwriters in the business like Damon Lindelof and J. Michael Straczynski, I began to relax.  This movie is a great example of not biting off more than you can chew.  Instead of trying to adapt the entire story, they wisely chose to focus on the initial outbreak and then the search for a vaccine.  Despite what the previews show, this is not a shoot 'em up.  There are some action scenes, some very tense scenes, but mostly it was about the investigation on how the disease started.  It was a wise choice, and while the movie is left unresolved (HELLO sequel!), it is a tight and compact story that works well.  

Another bonus surprise to me was that it was not very gratuitous as far as violence goes.  With shows like The Walking Dead, as good as they are, they have way too much violence in them.  Unfortunately, this trend is being generated by brain dead, childish fanboys who don't understand what exactly make a good zombie story.  It's not the gore that drives the drama but rather what people do in the face of what could be the end of humanity.  Whether it be an alien invasion, disaster flick, war or whatever, the drama is in people.  I am so thankful that the producers of this movie understood that fact and focused on what really made World War Z such a crowd-pleasing story and didn't focus on the lowest common denominator like a cut-rate slasher.  There are more than enough Dead Snows out there.  It's nice to see that there are some movies trying to rise above the sludge.  See this flick for that very reason.  It is better than I expected, and hopefully, good entertainment like this will continue.