Author:
Simulacrum
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Date:
7/1/2013 10:53:24 AM
Subject:
World War Z
simulcast on MBM
I went to see this yesterday, knowing full well it was a zombie movie. The reviews on Rotten Tomatoes tilt toward the plus side and it has Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt is an important movie actor who chooses his projects carefully. He even produced this one. The reviews hint at a serious treatment of the zombie "film genre."
So what could possibly go wrong?
1. Brad is a family man in this one. He has a reasonably intelligent and attractive wife and two cute little girls. He used to be some kind of investigator for the UN, a job that put him all kinds of danger for some reason, so apparently his wife talked him into quitting that and becoming a house husband. I guess he draws some kind of retirement pay from the UN while he practices his new profession of cooking waffles for his kids.
The problem here is that his family is very generic. You don't care one way or another about them, even though Brad goes berserk if one of his little girls has an asthma attack or early onset autism or in any way evinces signs of not being spoiled rotten. The other little girl is just a cipher. The wife does 21st-century wifely things like hovering over the kids and being smart, but I never cared enough to find out her name. Or the kids' names. Mostly all they did was scream and mewl, so I was kind of rooting for the zombies here.
2. The zombies did not disappoint me at being disappointing zombies, as zombies always are. They were not remarkable or interesting in any way. So I stopped rooting for them and tried to get interested in what Brad was doing.
3. Mostly Brad traveled from one place to another, looking for a zombie plague cure and dodging zombies. This could have been interesting, but it was just noisy and tiresome. This is what you get with zombies. You can't get anything else.
So if you want to see Left 4 Dead: The Movie, you should see World War Z, because that's all it is. It's almost literally a movie version of L4D. You have almost exactly the same conventions, the same behaviors, etc. I wouldn't have been surprised to see the L4D/2 characters making cameo appearances. The only thing missing were special infecteds. Maybe they'll insert those in the sequel.
2/10
