![]() ![]() Moneyball, at least, had a central, Pitt-friendly character to play. ![]() (READ: Brad Pitt as the crafty General Manager of Moneyball) Three different writers and three more directors later, the star-producer-philanthropist-dreamboat (and serial father) had birthed one of the most admired and likable movies of 2011. To Lewis’ already romanticized take on Beane and his sabermetric savvy, Pitt added a daddy-daughter subplot. (READ: Allie Townsend’s interview with World War Z author Max Brooks)Ī few years before he outbid Leonardo DiCaprio for the movie rights to World War Z and chose Marc Forster ( Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace) to direct it, Pitt had begun trying to make a film of another “unfilmable” book: Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ chronicle of how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane guided his underfunded team through the 2002 season. How could a story with so many perspectives and a corrosive view of greed under pressure become a big-budget Hollywood movie? Well, the producer was Brad Pitt. Part geopolitical satire, the book hopscotches among a dozen or so countries and includes more than 40 narrators offering their testimony to an unnamed U.N. Fictionalizing the interview techniques of Studs Terkel, the author (the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft) created a global docudrama of pandemic plague, government inefficiency, corporate crime and human fear. Max Brooks’ 2006 novel posed as an “oral history” of the Zombie War. What chance does one man have to defeat a ravenous über-Army? Well, he’s played by Brad Pitt. ![]() Zombies - the military calls them “zekes” - have swarmed across the planet, killing billions, by the time ex–United Nations troubleshooter Gerry Lane gets involved. In Jerusalem, by the thousands, they climb over one another like huge, mad rats to scale a high wall and gnaw their virus into the refugees on the other side. They sprout on Philadelphia streets within a dozen seconds of being infected, career en masse off a Newark tenement rooftop in pursuit of fresh hosts. The zombies in World War Z are a swift, teeming mass, a “perfect delivery system” for worldwide plague. They aren’t adorable if voracious teens, like the undead kid in the ghoul-meets-girl Warm Bodies. It was nice to see Brad Pitt in a movie again, but that kid needs to cut his hair.Follow don’t shamble in a malevolent sleepwalk, like the creatures in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. It got genuine laughter from the entire theater. There's this one scene where Pitt uses a Pepsi machine to distract a group of zombies, but before doing so he takes a nice, long, refreshing gulp out of one of them. Maybe I just watch too many horror movies, but I thought this one could have been anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour shorter. I found that towards the end the movie was trying to stretch out tension that didn't really exist for me. ![]() But, you know, whatever, it's a movie and a country can dream if she wants. This seems like an incredibly outdated formula especially today when we can't even keep it together enough to retain the friendship of The Other White Guys. As we all know from Independence Day, when the world is in trouble it's up to the US to rally everybody together to fight the bad guys. As much as World War Z attempts to be apolitical, spectacular nonsense, it does betray its position with regards to one thing: the United States is apparently still the world's savior. But as we should all know by now, abstaining from politics is still a political position. So, yeah, I would have preferred the political take on this adaptation even if it was boring. You have to have something more up your sleeve. Sure, showing a massive horde of zombies scrambling over each other to climb up a wall is probably going to get people to come see your movie, but they're all going to be disappointed when that's all you've got to offer. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it makes the movie into pure spectacle, and if you're going to make a pure spectacle movie then you can't blow the biggest shots in the trailers. As many have already discussed, the film takes all the politics out of the book and throws them away. World War Z is a bad movie (or at best a mediocre one), but for a different reason. I've read a couple reviews arguing that World War Z is a bad movie because it had a faulty premise: trying to make a bloodless, gore-free zombie movie.* I actually thought the PG-13 zombies were pretty great, and the scenes where the zombies are all in swarming-mode were really fun to watch (I would hesitate before bringing children to see this-no blood doesn't mean no nightmares). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |