World War Z

Quick, let's checkout this girl before Angelina spies her!

Grade: C

Director: Marc Forster

Starring: Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 56 min.

One of the most irksome critiques offered about a movie is that “it was different from the book.” Film adaptations that faithfully regurgitate their literary sources are often stunted by their slavish adherence to substance over style instead of taking the reasonable and necessary step of retooling both content and presentation for a different medium.

That said, every so often comes a film like World War Z, whose thematic soul wilts in the summer movie heat. Max Brooks’ popular 2006 book of the same name provides an oral history of mankind’s fight against a pandemic zombie outbreak. Told from multiple rotating perspectives, the book uses the war against a zombie plague as a springboard for exploring the particular geo-political, cultural, religious and environmental obstacles that complicate fighting the war. It’s a film adaptation that screams out for the sort of interconnected, multi-narrative format employed by Steven Soderbergh in Traffic, Paul Haggis in Crash, and especially Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel.

The closest the Marc Forster-directed, Brad Pitt-starring World War Z comes is a scene where Pitt’s United Nations flack Gerry Lane visits a bunker in South Korea and encounters a jailed ex-CIA agent played by David Morse. The half-mad agent relays the rumor that North Korea sought to stymie the zombie outbreak by immediately mandating nationwide teeth extractions—about 23 million, “a marvel in social engineering.”

It’s this sort of fact-based fiction that is the tantalizing hallmark of Brooks’ novel but goes missing in the Hollywood movie that instead opts for the Hollywood star. Pitt’s character is the film’s focal point, globetrotting from the United States to Asia to Jerusalem to peruse the pandemic and its source. In actuality, Lane leaps from one dark corridor to another, with the unending undead serving as fear-fodder.

Many have probably confused Philadelphia during rush hour with a zombie scourge, but here Lane and his nuclear family experience the real thing before helicoptering to the safety of an offshore military aircraft carrier. Lane’s wife and kids can keep their bunks if Lane reenlists to help random government agencies figure out what is going on and why.

The film effectively reminds us of the precarious tapestry of our social fabric—pushed to extremes, the mob trumps all our semblances of security. There are some nail-biting scenes, including when the zombie horde figures out how to scale en masse a giant wall Israel quickly erected around Jerusalem at the first far-off hint of an undead uprising—why and how they were able to do this is a question asked and never answered. And the Hobson’s choice Lane faces once passengers aboard his commercial airliner rapidly morph into zombies midflight is the highlight of the film.

But while any nuance was left on the page, World War Z poses a new set of replacement puzzlers, such as why Lane (bad haircut and all) is so indispensable to rooting out the cause(s) of the plague (somebody mentions his involvement with the Liberian Civil War and Second Chechen War, whatever that’s worth). And I’m still trying to figure out why Lane’s ultimate solution to winning the Zombie War isn’t just an alternate pathway to human extinction.

While the zombies of World War Z are the 28 Days Later variety of snarling sprinters, this new film doesn’t share any of the social and political commentary in Danny Boyle’s genre remake or, for that matter, Shaun of the Dead, AMC’s The Walking Dead, and the indomitable oeuvre of George Romero. If World War Zzzzz were all PG-13 spectacle, at least it might be a suitable summer blockbuster. Instead, it’s also a zombified bore full of cheap chills and tired tropes.

Warm Bodies

Even in a post-apocalyptic future,

you'll end up next to this in the $5 bin at Walmart

Grade: C
Director: Jonathan Levine
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Analeigh Tipton, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco and John Malkovich
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 37 min.

It takes more than Kensington Gore to make a good monster movie, and it takes more than spackling your film with Shakespearean tropes to lend it Meaning™. Warm Bodies tries to have to both ways, along with harvesting the teen romantic-comedy market for good measure. Isaac Marion’s source novel of the same name was published in late 2011, an important fact in nailing down its sundry pop-cultural influences. It’s Romeo & Juliet meets The Walking Dead meets Twilight meets a steaming pile of rotting entrails.

Our narrator is a zombie named R (Nicholas Hoult)—as in Romeo, get it?—who falls for a girl named Julie (Teresa Palmer)—as in Juliet, get it?—and has a best friend named M (Rob Corddry)—as in...oh, forget it. There’s also a scene where R appears below Julie’s balcony. But while R and Julie’s respective tribes don’t get along, it has less to do with family squabbling and more to do with the fact that R’s undead pals want to feast on Julie and the last vestiges of humankind.

But R is unusual, starting with the fact that while he can’t talk, sleep, dream or do anything but amble around all day waiting for a dollop of viscera to fall his way, he can provide an entirely articulate, introspective voice over narration. While on food patrol one day, R and his buddies happen upon a band of gun totting 20-somethings, including Julie and her boyfriend Perry (Dave Franco). R munches on Perry’s brains, allowing R to absorb and envision Perry’s memories, which are projected somewhat miraculously in two-shot and multi-angle imagery. R becomes infatuated with Julie and sneaks her to his home, an abandoned 747 parked on the tarmac of a derelict airport.

Never mind the fact that R chowed down on Julie's boo—his tousled hair and ‘80s vinyl record collection, when combined with a heady dose of Stockholm Syndrome, is all that’s required for her to go gaga. In return, R starts experiencing some special feelings that spread to the rest of his carnivorous clan the first time they glimpse R and Julie holding hands.

Director Jonathan Levine (50/50, The Wackness) aims to imbue this romance with some sidelong commentary about our disconnected society. But limiting ourselves to the zombie genre, that was done better and more satirically in just the opening half-hour of Shaun of the Dead. All Warm Bodies does is offer up such puzzling queries as why these zombies are the slow-moving George Romero kind at the beginning of the film but the frenzied 28 Days Later variety by the end. Why is ‘80s rock, record players and Polaroid instant cameras featured prominently alongside iPods, Blu-ray and convertible BMWs? What is the power source for R’s airplane and the moving walkways at the zombie-populated airport? Since R is already dead, why does Julie constantly refer to the threat of him “dying” or getting “killed,” including at the hands of her ramrod, freedom-fighting father (John Malkovich)?

Levine shoots the film in a drab grayscale; apologists would say this is to capture the look of a post-apocalyptic tableau when its true intent is avoiding the sort of vivid imagery that would usually carry with it an R-rating instead of the tepid PG-13 the filmmakers clearly wanted. Moreover, if you’re going to foist Romeo & Juliet, then have the courage of your literary conceit and embrace its tragic story arc. Put these together, and Warm Bodies is the thing you’d least expect: bloodless.

Zombieland

Clean-up on Aisle 5

Grade: B

Director: Ruben Fleischer

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 28 minutes

Thirty years ago, George A. Romero tailored his chosen film genre – zombie horror movies – into a critique of American consumerism and social decadence and excess in Dawn of the Dead. Hollywood’s latest zombie flick, Zombieland, is not set inside a shopping mall. But, when four survivors of a zombie pandemic begin a trek for utopistic refuge, they don’t climb a majestic mountaintop or setup camp on a white sand beach. Instead, they make tracks for Pacific Playland, a Southern California amusement park where they believe they can recreate one final conception of innocence in a world gone mad. Interestingly, once the survivors illumine the park’s lights, zombies for miles around are drawn its neon glow like consumer moths to a flame.

Prior to that, Zombieland chronicles the uneasy bond forged between the final foursome, each of whom refers to each other by the name of their respective hometowns to avoid emotional attachments that might need to be severed at a moment’s notice. Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) lives by an enumerated set of rules for surviving in Zombieland: practice good cardio, always double tap downed zombies, check the backseats of cars before getting in, etc. Columbus hooks up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a hard-charging redneck who relishes both his proficiency at killing the undead and the chance to taste just one more Twinkie before he dies of they all go bad, whichever comes first.

Along the way, they hookup with a grifter sister-act (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) and crash at Bill Murray’s mansion, leading to the film’s best sequence and Murray’s funniest onscreen offering in years. Let’s just say it takes the end of the world for Murray to express regret over Garfield and give us the closest thing we’ll ever see to another Ghostbusters sequel.

Zombieland boasts some nifty art direction and makeup, and director Ruben Fleischer supplies an opening credits sequence cut from the Watchmen cloth, set to the strains of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” However, it is the performances that carry the film through numerous slow patches and a generally aimless screenplay. Both Eisenberg and Harrelson indirectly spoof prior roles: Harrelson in National Born Killers and Eisenberg in the like-titled Adventureland, another movie in which his trademark neurotic Nellie comes of age inside an amusement park. And Stone supplies a glimpse of the fine actress she can become once she learns to curb her nervous tics.

As far as zom-coms go, Zombieland is not scarier or funnier than Shaun of the Dead. But, at an efficient 88 minutes, it is a rollicking, amusing diversion from both real-life tribulations and the films (and filmmakers) that wallow in them.

Neil Morris

Diary of the Dead

Ugh, more leftovers...

Grade: C –
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Michelle Morgan and Jose Close
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

George Romero’s zombie films have, to his fans, assumed the rarified air normally reserved for, say, the latest Woody Allen comedy or Martin Scorsese gangster flick. Even as the undead genre winds its way through revival (28 Days/Weeks Later; Cabin Fever) and parody (Shaun of the Dead), Romero’s imprimatur affords his ongoing work a certain level of cachet … and critical lenience.

Diary of the Dead, Romero’s fifth zombie movie, is full of characters exuding single-minded grit. Unfortunately, they are the zombies, because the survivors traversing the director’s latest apocalyptic rendering are as uninteresting as they are unimportant. A class of young film students and their professor abandon production of their own amateur horror movie when the actual flesh-eating undead begin to rise. The group grabs a camera, hops into an RV, and start traveling from one harrowing misadventure to another.

Diary is presented under the guise of an amateur film under the ironic title “The Death of Death,” which compiles handheld camera footage the group captures during their odyssey. Apparently, they also found time in the midst of the end of days to splice in various surveillance camera video, digital effects, and a voiceover narration, not to mention uploading the whole thing to MySpace. The plot is typically one-note—zombie attack, grieving a loss, pointless bickering, followed by another zombie attack—and punctuated by dialogue so banal and hollow it sounds as if it was actually written for the cut-rate project this movie pretends to be.

Fictional amateur filmmaking slowly becomes a cover for actual lazy filmmaking when the students conveniently stumble across a second high-def camera inside a hospital (?!) just so Romero can start employing multiple angles and cutaways; even with this allowance, the camerawork remains conveniently omnipresent. Romero intentionally inserts film-editing defects even though we are told at the outset that the students’ movie was recorded and produced using digital equipment.

Amid the obligatory splattered brains and oozing entrails, Romero examines the ubiquity of our multimedia culture, a world where “if it’s not on video, it’s not real,” and assails how the YouTube generation has become desensitized to violence, disaster, war and death. In his reach for contemporary relevance, Romero at one point even uses actual post-Katrina footage to illustrate the urban chaos wrought by the zombies. (Cloverfield was pilloried for its mere fictional resemblance to New York on Sept. 11; imagine the outcry if it had incorporated video of the Twin Towers toppling.)

Here, Romero’s legendary skill at weaving social commentary seems forced and more than a little hypocritical. More than once, the screenplay equates shooting a gun with shooting a camera. This banal assertion ignores how the light of day often galvanizes public opinion, seals the historical record, or reveals truth, whether it be Holocaust horrors, the genocide in Sudan and Darfur or merely the role of surveillance video in identifying criminal perpetrators.

Moreover, a total lack of discernible irony leaves only obliviousness (or sheer chutzpah) to explain how this message can be delivered by a filmmaker who has made his living and legacy replicating bloodshed then committing the same for mass public consumption. Diary of the Dead ends with a couple of redneck hunters hanging and beheading a white, female zombie, after which the narrator wonders aloud whether our world is worth saving. Our world? Sure. On the other hand, it may be high time to put Romero’s cinematic menagerie out of its misery. Call it, well, The Death of Death.

Neil Morris