World War Z (2013) Review
5/10
Official trailer
Max Brooks wrote an oral history of a zombie war, presented as interviews conducted a decade afterward across dozens of countries, with no protagonist, no continuous narrative and no scene that runs longer than a few pages.
The film took the title, the premise and one character name, and made a globe-trotting thriller with a single hero and a family to get home to. What’s left is a different product wearing the same label, a bigger offense than anything that happens on screen.
It cost around one hundred and ninety million dollars by most accounts, which puts it near the top of the price list for zombie pictures, and the production was troubled enough to become the story. I find the film frustrating. Ten minutes of it are as thrilling as big-budget horror gets, and the rest feels like a studio paid for a great book and then decided it didn’t trust a word of it.
The 5 is generous and it’s almost entirely for the Jerusalem sequence. That’s spectacular. The rest is efficient and forgettable, and the third act was abandoned and reshot after the original ending didn’t work. That’s visible in the finished film.
What the Book Was Doing
The oral history format was the entire idea. Each chapter is one voice from one country, and the war assembles itself in the reader’s head out of accounts that don’t always agree.
That structure let Brooks write about things a conventional novel couldn’t reach. The logistics of feeding a continent. Why a modern army trained for asymmetric warfare would lose badly to an enemy that doesn’t retreat. What happens to the people who profit. Why South Africa’s plan works and is monstrous. How Cuba ends up wealthy. The chapter about the battle of Yonkers is the best thing in the book and it’s entirely a critique of military doctrine, delivered by a soldier who was there and is still furious. It’s also close to unfilmable in the conventional sense. That’s the main problem. A film needs a protagonist and the book refuses to supply one. Every attempt to find a through-line will destroy the thing that made it work.
The correct adaptation was an anthology series, which is obvious now and was obvious then, and the rights were bought for a summer tentpole instead. Brooks has been diplomatic about the film and has made clear it’s nothing to do with his book. That’s accurate and generous at the same time.
Some structures don’t convert, and the correct response is to change medium or to leave it alone, not to strip the structure out and keep the title. What made the book work was the first thing the film removed. The general principle is that a book’s form is usually essential instead of decorative. An epistolary novel, a fragmented chronology, an unreliable first person, a chorus of voices: each of these makes an argument that a conventional retelling can’t make, and the retelling will be a story with the point removed.
The test, when you’re adapting anything including your own material, is to write down what the original’s form makes possible that a conventional version couldn’t. If your new version can’t do that thing, you’re borrowing the premise. That’s a legitimate choice and it should be made knowingly instead of discovered in the edit.
The Jerusalem Sequence
For about ten minutes the film is what it should have been. Israel has walled the city, the defense is functioning, thousands of people are inside, and somebody competent is explaining the operation.
It works because there’s a system to understand and then a failure to watch. The wall holds. Then singing carries over it, the sound draws the dead, and they pile into a living ramp and come over the top.
The image of bodies climbing bodies is the only thing from the film anybody remembers, and it’s a real idea: an enemy that treats its own mass as a resource.
That image is the reason the film gets its 5 from me. It’s the one moment I’d happily watch again, and I wish the rest of the picture had been built around the thinking behind it. It’s also the only sequence with a political thought in it. The Israeli intelligence officer explaining why his service took the initial reports seriously, and describing the doctrine of the tenth man, is the book’s tone showing through for ninety seconds. Everything around it is airport thriller, and it loses me. Pitt’s character flies somewhere, learns something, escapes, flies somewhere else, and none of the locations has any detail beyond a caption. I’d be hard pressed to name one thing the film shows me about any of those places. That contrast is instructive. The one section with a rule to grasp is the one section that works, and the film doesn’t notice.
The Third Act Problem
The original ending was a large-scale battle in Russia, with Pitt’s character conscripted into a zombie-clearing unit. It was shot and abandoned at considerable cost. Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard were brought in to write a replacement, and a much smaller conclusion in a World Health Organization laboratory in Wales was written and filmed months later. The replacement is quieter and better. That’s the interesting part. A tense sequence in corridors with a handful of people and one wandering infected beats a battle nobody could make work.
The Wales ending is my favorite stretch after Jerusalem. The corridor sequence is tense in an old-fashioned way, a few people and one wandering infected, and it’s the only part of the back half where I cared who got bitten. What it can’t do is resolve anything, because the film hadn’t set anything up. It ends by finding a workaround, a camouflage instead of a cure, and narrating that the war continues. The reshoots reportedly added twenty million dollars and pushed the release back six months, and the film still made over five hundred million. That’s why the process is more discussed than the result. Pitt produced it, and there are accounts of the difficulty being partly a disagreement between star, director and studio about what the film was. Nobody involved has been especially forthcoming.
A rescued third act is a common and underdiscussed situation, and this film is a useful example of what a good rescue can and can’t do. Lindelof and Goddard produced a better sequence than the one they replaced, and they couldn’t manufacture a payoff for setups that were never planted.
The lesson for a writer facing a broken ending is to look backward before writing forward. An ending fails because the middle didn’t promise anything, and no amount of craft in the final chapters will fix an absence in chapter twelve. The repair is almost always upstream of the problem.
The test is to list what your ending pays off, and then find where each of those things was set up. Anything with no antecedent is arriving from nowhere, and readers experience that as arbitrary even when the scene itself is well written. If the list is short, the ending isn’t the thing that needs rewriting.
What the Film Gets Right
It’s worth being fair, because the film is competently made and the criticism can become a pile-on.
The opening twenty minutes are good. Traffic in Philadelphia, an explosion nobody explains, and a family in a car working out that something has happened before anybody has a word for it. The confusion is well handled.
The rule that the infected turn in twelve seconds is a real piece of design, because it removes the slow dread of the genre and replaces it with speed. Whether you prefer that’s taste, and it’s at least a decision.
The apartment building sequence, with the family sheltering with a Mexican household and the boy who leaves with them, is the only human material that works.
And the film is unusually restrained about gore for a zombie picture, having been cut to a lower certificate. That forces it to generate tension by other means and mostly succeeds.
None of this adds up to a good film, and it does add up to a watchable one. That’s a distinction worth preserving.
The Twelve Second Rule
The film’s one real design decision is that the infected turn in about twelve seconds, and it changes the entire genre it’s working in.
Traditional zombie fiction runs on delay. Somebody is bitten, hides it, and the audience waits. That waiting is where the dread and most of the drama live, and Romero built an entire subgenre on it.
Twelve seconds removes all of that. There’s no concealment, no slow reveal, no scene where a character conceals a wound from the group. What replaces it’s arithmetic: one bite becomes two in a quarter of a minute, and a crowd becomes a wave. The film uses that properly exactly once, in Jerusalem, where the mass becomes a ramp. The rest of the time it just makes the action faster.
Pitt’s character counts the seconds aloud on a Newark rooftop after infected blood gets in his mouth, standing at the edge in case he turns, and it’s one of the tensest moments in the picture for me. It’s one rule, laid out simply and applied under pressure, and I’d trade most of the globe-trotting for another scene built like it.
That the film has one good rule and deploys it twice in two hours is a fair summary of the whole enterprise.
Should you watch World War Z?
Watch the Jerusalem sequence and read the book, which has almost nothing in common with the film and is the better object by a wide margin. The film gets a 5 from me because ten great minutes and a decent rescue of an ending can’t make up for a hundred and ninety million dollars spent throwing away the smartest structure in zombie fiction. As an airport thriller it’s competent, and I wanted a lot more from that title.
