Eat and run

World War Z, the big-budget zombie apocalypse movie out of Hollywood, has a few light and amusing moments. And that’s a good thing, because audiences are quickly thrown into a two-hour roller coaster ride of dread and panic, suspense and horror. They are joined in that ride by Brad Pitt, executive producer of the film (based on Max Brooks’ novel), and playing a stalwart hero figure named Gerry Lane.

Some of the light and amusing moments involve Mr. Pitt habitually leaving his weapons behind when it is clear to us that he’s going to need them: that fireaxe to chop through rampaging zombie skulls, that crowbar to impale zombies before they click and clack their teeth through his carotid artery. (Note: Zombies don’t primarily eat brains; no zombie movie I’ve ever seen has featured zombies hissing “Braaains!!!” because, as far as I know, zombies don’t talk, and they’re not particular about what human body parts they eat. So: Stop saying “Braaains!!!”)

Another kind of amusing bit has Pitt noticing that a zombie is loose in the coach section of a commercial plane he’s flying in (he’s in business class). The zombie is rapidly infecting passengers in the cheap seats, so he discreetly closes the curtain on them. Don’t want to upset the champagne-swilling crowd up front.

And yet another funny bit has Pitt stopping after eluding a gang of zombies and — in a moment of relief — grabbing a soft drink from a machine and swigging a few cold sips. Ah… the pause that refreshes! It looks like a Pepsi, though you never see the label. Yet imagine the tie-in possibilities!

World War Z is not the best zombie movie ever, but it’s the most expensive, and the most ambitious one. It’s determined to bring zombies to the mainstream (as though Zombieland and The Walking Dead haven’t already achieved this already) via that ambassador of cool and charisma, Brad Pitt.

Pitt plays a former UN investigator whose job involved helping refugees relocate during regional crises — which, curiously, is Angelina Jolie’s actual role with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, though she probably rarely deals with zombies. Gerry’s wife (Mireille Enos from TV’s The Killing) and children are happy that he’s now a househusband, until a rapid viral outbreak leads the UN to call him back into action. (Why they think Pitt is the only guy in the country who can help in this crisis is a mystery. Perhaps Ms. Jolie was previously engaged.)

The outbreak spreads very quickly, depicted in a downtown Manhattan sequence that gets high marks for detailing the panic that might occur if such a thing actually happened: basically, people running like crazy away from people who are trying to chomp them. (As my wife points out, it’s scary because we’re suddenly no longer at the top of the food chain.) The zombie virus spreads quickly — in 12 seconds or less — so the potential for worldwide contagion is imminent.

This has a chilling feel of realism to it, as anyone who mulls over each new outbreak of bird flu in China or Asia knows; virus watchers look for that fatal tipping point when a deadly new flu will become capable of spreading from animal to human. When that happens, in this age of frequent flyer miles, we’re all pretty much doomed.

It’s a little odd making Brad Pitt the only man who can save the world. But it’s a necessary device to connect the various threads of the movie, which jump from Newark to South Korea to Israel to Wales. Gerry Lane gets around more than Robert Langdon in those Dan Brown books: one minute he’s trying to trace Patient Zero in South Korea (where he encounters a creepy David Morse as an ex-CIA agent who claims North Korea has stopped the zombie virus from spreading by pulling the teeth of every one of its citizens; apparently, zombies can’t gum you to death); next he’s flying to Israel, which has erected a 50-foot-high concrete wall around Jerusalem to keep zombies out (they allow Palestinian refugees in, which is progress of sorts). The Israel sequence is also an interesting commentary on isolationism and the danger of placing security above all other concerns.

But you don’t have much time to think about this stuff while watching World War Z, because it zips along from heart-pounding crisis to crisis. It’s designed this way, I think, to distract you from the fact that it’s not really very scary. The outbreak angle is truly scary, but we’ve become so culturally used to zombies — either the fast-moving variety, or the slow, shambling brain-dead ones from George Romero movies — that we pretty much know the drill by now: douple tap to the head, burn the bodies if you can; otherwise, run like hell. There are a few surprising new visuals — the mountain of writhing zombies climbing its way up concrete walls and skyscrapers in a blind, instinctive drive for human flesh: that’s a pretty fresh image. But generally, this zombie flick can’t really hold a candle to the raw horror of Romero’s original low-budget zombie series — Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). And here’s why: there’s nothing in World War Z that’s as primally scary as the scene in Night of the Living Dead where the dead brother reaches through the farmhouse door to drag his screaming sister out into the horde of zombies, or as shocking as the moment where the black hero, after surviving a zombie siege, is shot in the head by redneck hunters, his body blithely tossed onto a bonfire. That is the stuff of nightmares.

Also, modern fast-moving zombies gloss over the horror implicit in the idea of someone dining on your flesh; in Romero’s movies, the zombies would gather around a victim and have themselves a proper human buffet. In World War Z, it’s all eat and run: the zombies bite someone, grab a quick snack, and then move on. No wonder they don’t have an obesity problem. The gore in World War Z is intentionally minimal — all the better to sell tickets and not gross people out.

With his subversive low-budget films, Romero threw audiences headlong into a nightmare that had no escape. The zombie “outbreak” is never cured in Romero’s movies, because humanity triumphing over evil isn’t the point; survival is. And often, survival isn’t all about heroics and grand moves; it’s just about survival, which can be pretty grim at times.

Instead, we have Brad Pitt, looking like Gary Cooper, striding manfully through a pack of zombies and providing an uplifting commentary at the end of the movie.  Which, admittedly, sells more tickets.