World War Z (2013) Review
5/10
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. That is not an adaptation, it is a different product wearing the same label.
It cost around one hundred and ninety million dollars by most accounts, which makes it one of the most expensive zombie films ever made, and the production was troubled enough to become the story.
The 5 is generous and it is almost entirely for the Jerusalem sequence, which is genuinely spectacular. The rest is efficient and forgettable, and the third act was abandoned and reshot after the original ending did not work, which is 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 do not always agree.
That structure let Brooks write about things a conventional novel could not reach. The logistics of feeding a continent. Why a modern army trained for asymmetric warfare would lose badly to an enemy that does not 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 is entirely a critique of military doctrine, delivered by a soldier who was there and is still furious.
It is also close to unfilmable in the conventional sense, which is the honest 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 has nothing to do with his book, which is accurate and generous at the same time.
Some structures do not 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 load-bearing instead of decorative. An epistolary novel, a fragmented chronology, an unreliable first person, a chorus of voices: each of these is doing argumentative work that a conventional retelling cannot do, and the retelling will be a story with the point removed.
The test, when you are adapting anything including your own material, is to write down what the original’s form makes possible that a conventional version could not. If your new version cannot do that thing, you are not adapting it, you are borrowing the premise. That is 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 the operation is being explained by somebody competent.
It works because there is a system to understand and then a specific 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 is a genuine idea: an enemy that treats its own mass as a resource.
It is 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 register showing through for ninety seconds.
Everything around it is airport thriller. Pitt’s character flies somewhere, learns something, escapes, flies somewhere else, and none of the locations has any texture beyond a caption.
That contrast is instructive. The one section with a rule to grasp is the one section that works, and the film does not 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, which is the interesting part. A tense sequence in corridors with a handful of people and one wandering infected beats a battle nobody could make work.
What it cannot do is resolve anything, because the film had not 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, which is 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 cannot do. Lindelof and Goddard produced a better sequence than the one they replaced, and they could not 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 did not 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 is not the thing that needs rewriting.
What the Film Gets Right
It is worth being fair, because the film is competently made and the criticism can become a pile-on.
The opening twenty minutes are genuinely 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 is taste, and it is 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, which 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, which is a distinction worth preserving.
The Twelve Second Rule
The film’s one genuine design decision is that the infected turn in about twelve seconds, and it changes the entire genre it is 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 is no concealment, no slow reveal, no scene where a character conceals a wound from the group. What replaces it is 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 after a woman is bitten on a rooftop, waiting to see whether she turns, and it is the single most tense moment in the picture. One rule, stated, applied under pressure.
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. Read the book, which has almost nothing in common with the film and is the better object by a wide margin. If you want the film, it is a competent airport thriller with one extraordinary ten minutes in the middle.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 7 of my film lists