World War Z review

    (Just saying, I haven't  read the book, so don't expect any comparisons) 
    Zombies are very quickly becoming despised by mass audiences. The same story is being done over and over again, that of people having to move from location to location, fighting off zombies with gory kills and occasionally there's a tad bit of social commentary. So zombie films are starting to become more inventive; running zombies, zombie parodies, zombies that could become civilized again with help. But does World War Z follow in this same path of inventive stories and ideas in the zombie sub-genre?
...Kind of...
    That's really all I can say. This is a "Kind of" movie. It's kind of thrilling, it's kind of smart, it kind of has interesting characters, but World War Z never goes the full way.
    The movie I feel this is easily comparable to is Roland Emmerich's "magnum opus", 2012. Plot wise, they're very similar. In both, the characters face a continuous pattern of murphy's law contrivance getting them into a situation, then a coincidental contrivance getting him out. then repeat, and repeat, and repeat. This kind of rambling plot is lazy on every level, it's the equivalent of mediocre or worse internet fan fiction. Constraining itself to this specific plot, the movie runs into other problems.
    The reason zombie movies generally stay in one location is because that's how you make suspense. We get the time to let the claustrophobic feel sink in. Trying to have people move globally with an epidemic on hand is a lot more distracting then the classic scenario. I can respect the filmmakers for trying a different plot with zombies, but maybe they shouldn't have chosen a disaster formula that was terrible the first time it was used.
(Warning: minor spoilers ahead)
    Another problem with this plot, especially with the way it's executed here, is how close it gets to an interesting setup for a zombie movie several times. Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) is in places like an abandoned apartment building, a rainy army base, an overcrowded naval ship, a walled up Israel, and a Nova Scotia Laboratory. Yet, the movie never seems content with staying in one place and developing the location, which could have helped a lot with the too quick pace. It's almost angering how unashamed this movie is in jumping from place to place.
    I can say this about the plot, at least he has a specific reason to end up in each location he's in, and they each help solve the mystery of how to cure the zombies. He has to go to the rainy army base to see the dead bodies, then he has to go to Israel to talk to the president. For the majority of the film, there are actual reasons stated within the film that cause Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) to go to each new location. It doesn't feel THAT MUCH like a "go here because the script says so" kind of movie. It's not as bad as 2012 in that sense.
   That's not to say the film is never lazy from this aspect. It's through MAJOR convolution and Gerry getting extremely lucky that he ends up getting out of Israel and maintaining life after a plane crash and being impaled through the kidney area. And, of course, while Gerry has a reason to go to every different place and makes important discoveries there, they don't seem like discoveries that could only be found in those specific places. All of the plot movements could have been found in the same location, and this leads back to the problem I stated two paragraphs ago. The plot not only abandons every location as soon as we're comfortable with it, but the movie feels like it has to create and develop all of these different locations in the first place, and then abandon it.
    There are some scares in World War Z that are solid. They are way too far apart, and they aren't of enough quality or substance to create a creepy atmosphere, but they're still there, and deserve to be noticed. The scares get better near the end, taking the form of a plane ride and a laboratory . World War Z actually becomes kind of (there's that kind of again) clever and suspenseful in the final act. When Gerry figures out a camouflage from the zombies, he has to get it from the wing of the laboratory, that is basically a labyrinth covered with the infected creatures. This is definitely a well-crafted scene, and one of the very few that works. Unlike most scenes, this one knows that suspense comes from slowing down the moment and anticipating the scare. Most of the scares just move too fast for their own good, and any sense of dread or terror is lost.
    But it's not just pacing problems, the other reason any horror in this film is lost is:
You can't have a PG-13 Zombie film. Or at least, you can't have a PG-13 Zombie Apocalypse. I bring up that 2nd sentence because Warm Bodies proved you could do PG-13 Zombies. That was a romantic comedy, though, not really a horror film. None of the scenes needed gore, so Warm Bodies could get away with it. But Warm Bodies and World War Z are two VERY different movies. World War Z is actually a zombie apocalypse movie. When you take the blood out of a zombie apocalypse movie and make it PG-13 for the sake of a wider audience, you lose the sense of danger. We see Israel get flooded, we see characters get attacked, but the movie refuses to show the gritty effect of this cause in full. While I don't usually advise movies to add more blood and gore for the sake of entertainment, when you take it all out from a sub genre that desperately needs it, a sense of realism is gone, something  to anchor it in our world. This movie feels like it takes place in some alternate reality where the zombies  are able to kill you by just running around you, which is most of what we see them do.
   The scene that happens at the beginning, where we first see the zombies attack a crowded area in a large drove, represents the best and the worst of the rest of this movie. It moves at a too quick pace with the shaky cam technique being too shaky and the purposefully frenetic editing being too frenetic, but there are clever moments in it. Gerry finds out how long the evolution from human to zombie takes when he sees a guy get bitten, then the doll a kid dropped counts down from 12, which happens to be the amount of time the transformation takes. There are other moments and scenes like this, but in the end, the positives and negatives just balance out to make a big, whopping "kind-of".
                                                                2.5/5