Zombie Ishtar lives!
And better yet: Zombie
Ishtar, aka World War Z, is great.
It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s hardly the disaster that the Vanity Fair article, the one that drew
comparisons to Warren Beatty’s Moroccan mess Ishtar, seemed to suggest. I will say this, though, about the
troubled production: I would love to a see a Burden of Dreams-style behind-the-scenes documentary on the making
of this movie. Something tells me more work went into making this presentable
than we’ll ever realize.
The film stars Brad Pitt as Gerry, a husband and father of two
who’s caught up in a global zombie invasion. Before you start rolling your eyes
and huffing out “Ughh, another zombie
movie,” World War Z takes a different
approach. First of all, Gerry is some kind United Nations panic guru. When bad shit
goes down, he’s the boots on the ground to make sure people are evacuated,
protected, fed, clothed and otherwise safe. So when an advanced rabies disease
starts sweeping through Newark ,
N.J. Congo or that time in Pakistan
or when that dam burst Thailand ,
so we can cut him some slack.
I’m being hard on poor Gerry, although I’m not sure if it’s
because he picks bad zombie-proof cars or his name is in direct violation of
that quasi-secret Hollywood pact that
specifies “always Jerry, never Gerry.” The thing is, Gerry is a gnarly dude.
He’s cool under pressure, he knows all the angles of government diplomacy, he
can handle a gun and he can perceive important details in the chaos. In one
scene he counts in his head the number of seconds it takes a bitten man to
“turn,” zombie parlance for “register with the Zombie Party of America.” (It’s
12 seconds, by the way.) In another scene, Gerry witnesses a wee human child get
swept up, but never bitten, in the zombie wave.
What does it all mean? Well, leave it to Gerry, who saves his
family and then hops on a military plane to jet around the world to investigate
the earth’s single largest crime scene. He starts in South Korea , where some soldiers
found a doctor with a strange disease. Gerry is walked ominously into a room
filled with ash and burnt corpses, some of them still wriggling. “Mother Nature
is a serial killer,” someone says. He gathers leads and heads off to Israel , which
has braved the zombie swarm remarkably well behind 80-foot walls built during
the Biblical ages. An Israeli agent launches into a Jewish history lesson about
why Jews were destined to overcome the zombie horde, and then they’re overcome
by the zombie horde in a spectacular wave of undead that act more like army
ants than humans.
I appreciate that Gerry is smart enough and calm enough to work
his way through problems without being a blubbery mess. I think AMC’s Walking Dead, a once great but slowly
failing zombie drama, needs a Gerry character to spirit the cast away from
Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes character and all his hopeless inner turmoil. If I
hear him say “for the good of the group” one more time I might lose it. To
contrast Grimes’ wrecked psyche, look at a stupendously awesome sequence in Z: When an airplane’s entire economy
class is zombified mid-flight, Gerry makes a carry-on suitcase fort between
economy and first class. Ever so slowly, the wall goes up and up as quiet as
possible to not alert the feeding frenzy in the rear of the plane. It’s a
terrifically thrilling sequence and it ends with Gerry making a hasty, but
necessary decision involving a hand grenade. Walking Dead would have labored with these split-second decisions
for entire episodes, but here’s Gerry detonating hand grenades in commercial
airliners.
Pitt’s Gerry has a number of other remarkably simple, but
entirely unique, scenes that will add further footnotes to the zombie encyclopedia.
Once after getting zombie blood dripped on his face, he stands on the edge of a
tall building counting to twelve to see if he’ll turn. In another scene, he has
a Pepsi at the worst time to have a Pepsi; the audacity of his beverage craving
is almost worth the product placement. He chops off arms, injects himself with
random vials of Ebola and typhoid, and gives butterfly kisses to a lipless zombie.
Best of all, the character is framed within a zombie detective thriller, which
gives it another original edge.
Much of the movie is spent looking for Patient Zero, that first poor
chump who was gorging himself on infected tapir meat and contracted the zombie
plague. And this is where much of the plot falls to pieces. Gerry jets around
the world looking for Zero, and just when I thought he was getting close — and
just when the mystery had relentlessly consumed me — the film switches gears.
It’s all Patient Zero, Patient Zero, Patient Zero … hey, let’s find a cure.
Now, the cure is interesting, especially how it is applied, but I wanted to
finished that Patient Zero thread out. Instead, World War Z cut it completely. So when the end of the film rolls
around, everything seems a little rushed, as if frantically ending the movie
with open plot holes was better than the original ending, which was apparently
a plot-killing mess. Again, though, I would love to see the other versions of
this movie, to know if this Patient Zero plot was ever resolved. By the way,
this movie is based on Max Brooks’ popular novel, which also had a limp,
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ending.
Another frustration are Gerry’s children, who are so incompetent
— even by dumb movie-children standards — that they seemed to be thrown into
the movie to serve as some kind of new birth control device. “Look at what
unprotected sex will do to you!” the movie screamed at you every time one of
the little twerps ignored every instinct to survive. One kid won’t crawl out of
a car that’s being swarmed by zombies, so there Gerry kneels coaxing her out. Any
other dad would break her arms prying her out; better than having a zombie
daughter, right? The other one just screams in empty hallways, which alerts
every Zeke (that’s what they call the zombies sometimes) along the eastern
seaboard. The wife isn’t much better: she knows he’s in the field, possibly
around zombies, so she decides to cold call him on his satellite phone with its
ringer apparently plugged into wall of Van Halen amplifiers.
I guess these minor complaints all touch on a similar theme: the
audience of a zombie movie will always and forever know more about zombies than
anyone in the actual movie. We learned about zombies from Walking Dead, George Romero, Shaun
of the Dead, 28 Days Later and Dead Alive; the characters of zombie
movies don’t have that same education.
In any case, I enjoyed World
War Z despite its obvious faults. Stay tuned for that director’s cut. It’s
going to be an interesting lesson in film editing.
