World War Z

Though at one point on course to be a megaflop, it looks like World War Z may now be considered successful enough for sequels. Like Avatar, this is another triumph of style over substance. It has some very impressive scenes of bodies piling up and planes and helicopters crashing down and huge crowd scenes, but plot, characters and pace? Truly dire.

The sad fact is that after playing The Last of Us, this comes as a pale imitation. Sure, games haven’t reached a true level of realism yet, but the zombies are a hell of a lot more creepy and the story is far more imaginative.

Here, Brad Pitt’s character, who we’re expected to believe is respected at the very highest level of government and a super-kick-ass operative, has become a family man with two incredibly annoying kids whose uselessness is meant to give him a sensitive side but just grates like nails on blackboard. Coerced into going into the field, he fucks things up for everyone he meets (an army base is massacred because his phone goes off; he doesn’t tell what survivors there may be on a plane that he’s gonna blow up its wall so they all die along with the pilots who would otherwise have likely made it; and okay, in Israel he just happens to be there right as chaos really sets in. He also has a mutant healing factor after getting a metal spike through the abdomen, and magical powers of finding a building from a plane crash site with no way of knowing how to get there.

Overlong to the point of pomposity, hugely unoriginal and with a solution that should have been observed by huge numbers of the population and those leading scientists who were shown as so inept, not just tough guy Pitt.