World War Z (2013)

Which do YOU prefer? Instant Zombies, or Zombies from scratch?

World War Z
Director: Marc Forster
Writers: Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof (screenplay), Matthew Michael Carnahan and J. Michael Straczinski (screen story). Based on the novel by Max Brooks

It’s morning in Anytown, U.S.A. In a charming clapboard house, Brad Pitt and his wife are asleep, which means that two giggling children are about to come running in and jump on the bed, because that’s what families do in movies, as opposed to real life, where I would have gotten in so much trouble for waking up my old man on his day off. Unless it was Christmas morning, which is like The Purge for the specific crime of parent-waking.

Cut to the kitchen. Brad has long blonde locks and a beard, because someone apparently told him he’d be playing Thor. Or Zonker Harris. Instead, he’s a guy who used to work for the UN in some vague capacity, and now makes pancakes for his daughters all day, wielding a spatula like it’s the mighty Mjolnir.

Cut to Philadelphia, where Brad and his family sit in traffic while we learn that Brad’s wife used to be British, but has lost her accent, and there are rabies in Taiwan. Turns out there’s also zombies in Philadelphia—quite a lot of them, actually—but no one thinks to mention it until suddenly they’re swarming all over the traffic jam like it’s Black Friday at Wal-Mart. And not only are these undead fast— they can outrun a Winnebago, which suggests the zombie apocalypse is going to reap a particularly high body count in Texas and South Dakota—but so is the virus which creates them; Brad watches one discount hipster get chomped and go from Old Navy model to full-blown revenant in about ten seconds, which strikes me as an embarrassing case of premature incubation. I prefer a little tension in my zombie movies—the pathos and suspense of waiting for a bitten friend to turn are some of the most harrowing scenes in the genre—but here the transformations are over quicker than an Amish wedding night.

Brad jacks an old RV—personally, I would have stolen something faster than a zombie, but it does come with its own hunting rifle—and immediately pulls over because his daughter is having an asthma attack. So fine, let’s all stop the Apocalypse because Brianna can’t find her puffer. Just then Jack’s former boss calls him from a helicopter. He’s fleeing the UN building since New York is in flames and overrun by the undead. On the bright side, he got his whole staff killed, so there’s a job opening in Ordinary Premium Accounting.

Brad and his family loot a Shop-Rite in Newark, where Brad shoots an irritated consumer near a Prestone point-of-purchase display, then they invite themselves to squat with a nice Latino family. Brad fiddles with their radio and gets the Emergency Broadcast System, and even though, for once, it’s not just a test, he is still not instructed where to tune in his local area for news and official information. Instead, he makes shitty armor out of magazines, and duct tapes a steak knife to his rifle, then leads his family into a stairwell where they hunker down to wait. After awhile, Daughter Number Two announces, “I’m scared” (in a tone of voice that suggests she really meant “I’m bored”, but was trying to be polite), but Brad tells her a helicopter is coming for them, and to “keep your eyes on Mommy and Daddy.” Really? I’d tell the kid to keep an eye out for zombies, but I’m not the guy wearing Kevlar made out of Cosmo and Sassy.

The chopper flies Brad and family to the United Nations Command Ship, the U.S.S. Exposition, where his Boss explains that the president is dead, there are gun battles in the streets of Washington, D.C., and Ted Cruz’s erection has lasted longer than four hours. Big cities are the hardest hit, because “airlines are the perfect delivery system,” which seems odd, since the disease has a ten second incubation period, so I’m pretty sure the passengers would start leaping around and devouring each other well short of their destination, making it extremely difficult to maneuver the drinks cart through the aisle.

Anyway, surviving scientist Dr. Fassbach wants to go South Korea to see if he can find a vaccine or something, and the military blackmails Brad into going along. In the plane, Fassbach explains his theory that “Mother Nature is a serial killer,” and “like all serial killers she can’t help the urge to want to get caught,” so she cuts out letters from magazines and mails cryptic messages to the CDC.

When they get to South Korea they’re met by a Welcome Wagon of extremely athletic dead people, and Dr. Fassbach immediately slips on the wet tarmac, shoots himself, and dies. (I saw it and it was his own fault, he can’t pin this one on Mother Nature.)

So Brad’s business trip was a complete waste of time. Fortunately, he meets David Morse, who just happens to be in the midst of a nice juicy cameo role as a disgraced CIA agent with a lot of convenient information, and he tells Brad that Israel made its borders zombie-proof, so Brad takes off for Jerusalem (but first a bunch of soldiers have to refuel his plane while getting attacked by the undead, as Brad rides a squeaky bicycle in inclement weather like Miss Gulch from The Wizard of Oz).

During the flight Brad calls his wife to chat about the kids, but then someone sets off an atomic bomb right under the plane and the call drops. But it was such a boring conversation that neither one bothers to call back.

Israel has built a 100-foot high wall all around the country (meanwhile, John McCain stands on the U.S. southern border shouting, “Finish the dang fence!”, but nobody pays any attention to him because they’ve all turned into cross-training carrion). The people inside, Jews and Arabs alike, are all so filled with love that they gather together and sing a happy rendition of Kumbaya, which drives the zombies into a fever of organization, and they build a human pyramid from a million undead cheerleaders, and spill over the wall. So the lesson here is: hootenannies kill.

Brad immediately runs for his plane like a little wuss. His Israeli bodyguard gets bitten, so he lops her hand off to stop the infection and to prove he saw Evil Dead II. Unfortunately, his pilot is an even bigger wuss, and takes off before Brad can get on the plane, even though he’s a Premiere Gold Club Key Card Member and entitled to pre-boarding.

Brad thumbs a ride with a taxiing airliner, dragging along the woman he mutilated, and as they fly to Cardiff, presumably to see if Torchwood can help, he figures out the ANSWER! Unfortunately, somebody brought a zombie as carry-on and the passengers start eating each other rather than pay eleven dollars for one of those crappy box lunches they give you. Brad throws a grenade into Coach, blowing a hole in the fuselage and scattering zombies across the idyllic Welsh countryside. The aircraft plows into a forest and completely breaks apart, but Brad survives, although he’s now got a huge aluminum splinter stuck through his body.

Despite being speared like a cocktail weenie, Brad and his amputee victim walk to the nearest World Health Organization facility. But back aboard the good ship Exposition, Brad has been written off as MIA and his wife and children evicted, their bunks turned over to a family whose father isn’t stupid enough to chuck grenades around an airliner.

Brad wakes up at the WHO, and finds himself staring into the face of Doctor Who (the cranky twelfth one)! Unfortunately, the Doctor’s not that helpful, but he is still cranky, especially after Brad tells him about his plan to infect everybody with a terminal illness so the zombies won’t find them appetizing.

Unfortunately, the pathogens they need are stored in the Plot Point Memorial Wing, which is occupied by zombies, so the next twenty minutes consist mostly of people sneaking and running and sliding around hospital corridors like a particularly wacky episode of Scrubs.

Anyway, Brad’s stupid plan works. As he takes a boat to go pick up his family he suddenly says in voice over: “It’s not over,” which strikes me as needlessly cruel, like taunting a garden slug after you’ve already poured salt on it.

To sum up: it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, mainly because she’s a serial killer, so don’t pretend your smooth, creamery margarine is butter, or she’ll give you zombies.

The end.

Okay, so what did we learn from this film? Well, let’s start by unpacking those writing credits, in reverse order:

Based on the novel by Max Brooks

It’s not easy translating a novel to film, especially one styled as an oral history. It’d be like adapting Studs Terkel’s The Good War, one of Brooks’ acknowledged inspirations, (although they did make a successful Broadway musical out of Terkel’s earlier oral history, Working). A particularly thorny problem with this story is that the book is a retrospective of the Zombie War, so we know the narrator (a literary version of Brooks himself) survives, along with everyone he interviews. This presents a problem, not only in generating suspense, but also any feeling of forward momentum. I haven’t read early versions of the screenplay, but I’d be willing to bet the first attempts at adaptation featured a recursive, flashback-heavy structure that eventually just disappeared up its own ass.

Matthew Michael Carnahan and J. Michael Straczinski (screen story).

Generally, this means they wrote the first draft, and got fired.

Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof (screenplay)

This means Matthew Michael Carnahan, fired after the first draft, was rehired to write one of the many subsequent drafts, and some of his work survives in the final product. The ampersand that links Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof means they worked on the script as a team. As for how many other scribes may have toiled in this particular vineyard, there’s no way to know without peeking at the Writers Guild of America’s credit arbitration records. But with big budget spectaculars like this, nervous executives will often throw writer after writer after writer at the script, believing they can brute force quality with quantity. It’s the kind of literary theory one might expect from people who dream of a day when they need no longer employ humans, because all their content is written by unpaid troll bots who have to mine bitcoin on the side just to make ends meet.

Whether it’s true that the quality of a movie is proportional to the total number of writers who worked on the script is something I can’t, or rather won’t say, because it sounds too much like math. And to be honest I’m actually more haunted by the near misses, the things we almost learned, but didn’t. Like that scene on the airliner where Brad went rogue and insisted on delivering the safety demonstration? But instead of pointing out the toilets fore and aft and showing how life vests worked, he led by example, demonstrating what you shouldn’t do—throw a grenade in an Airbus at 35,000 feet—because that’ll make the plane crash and then you’ll get transfixed by the fuselage.

Which is obviously bad, but if this were a vampire rather than a zombie movie, we’d finally learn something useful. Like, does a vamp-killing stake have to be wooden, or does aluminum work just as well? My theory is yeah, it works okay, but it’s an abomination, like aluminum bats in college baseball. Also, instead of that satisfying, somewhat moist “SHLUNK!” you get when perforating a bloodsucker’s pericardium with a shaft of hawthorn-wood, aluminum stakes just make a sad, hollow “plink!”.

But what about you guys? Have you gleaned any useful tips for surviving the Zombie Apocalypse?¹

1. I’ve already duct-taped the cream cheese knife to my Super Soaker, so I think we’re gonna be okay.