tek's rating:

World War Z (PG-13)
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This came out in 2013, but I didn't see it until 2022. It's very loosely based on a 2006 book of the same name, which I haven't read. It's more of an action/disaster movie than a zombie movie, but zombies are an integral part of it. (They are the disaster.) I thought the zombies were pretty good in this movie... not all that original, but scary because of their tenacity. As is common these days, they are treated as the result of a virus, and they're faster than traditional zombies. (Normal human speed, but frequently running, at least when they're attacking.) They can be as listless as traditional zombies when not attacking, which mainly happens when they're attracted by noise. Once they do attack, they're pretty good at overcoming barriers. And they'll do anything to reach people, including throwing themselves from great heights, knowing they'll survive the fall. So I liked the zombie part of the movie, and the attempt to find a cure for zombie-ism was decent.

The movie stars Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, a family man with a wife named Karin (Mireille Enos) and two young daughters, Rachel and Constance. He's retired from the U.N., where I think he was a journalist, but I could be wrong about that. The movie treats him as if he had been a high-ranking soldier, or something. Either way, he's got a lot of experience in war zones. When the zombie apocalypse starts, his old friend Thierry Umutoni, the Deputy Secretary-General of the U.N., calls him back into service to lead the mission to find a cure, by looking for the source of the outbreak. He and his family, along with a boy named Tommy (who escaped with them from an apartment building in New Jersey that was overrun by zombies) are evacuated to an aircraft carrier. At first, Gerry refuses to take on the mission, but agrees when the captain of the carrier tells them his family won't be allowed to stay there unless he does. The mission takes him first to South Korea, and later to Jerusalem. It's there that the most impressive zombie attack takes place, I'd say. It's also where Gerry meets an Israeli soldier called Segen, and she escapes with him to a commercial airplane that gets redirected to Cardiff, Wales. There they make their way to a WHO facility, where most of the people have become zombies. But they meet a few doctors who haven't been infected, including one played by Peter Capaldi and one played by Ruth Negga (and one other one whose actor is unfamiliar to me, but who is in charge of the facility). Gerry has come up with an idea of how to make people "invisible" to zombies, which I don't want to spoil. But Gerry, Segen, and the senior doctor must try to sneak past zombies who are in the path they must take to get what they need for Gerry's plan.

That's all I want to say about the plot, but there's a fairly good ending (which is really just the beginning of the war). The whole movie was fairly good, but I wasn't as into it as I would have liked to be, and I'm not sure how memorable I'll find it. It's certainly not something I feel the need to watch again, but I'm definitely glad to have seen it once.


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