World War Z

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3552888&userid=118075#post416843041

The second shot of World War Z, if I recall, is Brad Pitt and wife lying in bed til their kids burst into the room. Anyone watching the film again (although, god, why would you?) should pay attention to the painting over their bed; it seems to depict a trail of blood leading to a black table. The wife then calls the kids 'little creatures', in an unsubtle metaphor.

What does this mean, though? Professor Clumsy's reading is that the film is kind of a dream of Brad Pitt throwing off the shackles of domesticity to feel like a big zombie-killer. Though he says he doesn't want to, his unconscious desire is to leave his family behind.

I'd argue the opposite: The opening scenes equate zombie combat with doing the dishes. The whole world war barely seems apocalyptic because it represents status quo. This, more than anything else, explains the frequent returns to the family on the boat. Brad Pitt going off to fight is an everyday occurrence that puts bread on the table. There was already blood over their bed from the beginning.

This is where the film gets questionable, because although we're told in expository dialogue that the zombies are all about the deterritorializing effects of capitalism and abstract stuff like that, the more concrete imagery is of infested slum tenements, their implicit truce with a homeless man, and their upsetting a lame multiculturalism parade in Israel.

Yep, these zombies are the downtrodden poor, the social abject. The inhuman excluded. What does it mean when [spoiler]the Latino family becomes bitten, absorbed by their tenement, and only their son escapes by following Brad Pitt?[/spoiler] There's something very wrong with the film, and it reaches a head with an entire segment of Israel and Palestine joining forces against... Palestine. The liberal, multiculturalism imagery is extremely on-point. Everyone is everyone is equal - so long as they fit in, act nice and sing happy songs. That's the message.

This logic spills over into the airplane sequence. Brad Pitt escapes with the few remaining Israelis in the first class seats of a jet liner, beating the zombie Palestinians in coach to death with the carry-on luggage. The first class vs coach imagery was not unintentional - see the stupid purse-dog thrown in for easy satire.

This is the point where Lindelof jumped in to rewrite the film, which should be fairly overt from the sudden appearance of his trademark [spoiler]Christ imagery. The whole system fucked, Brad Pitt blows a hole in the plane (intertextuality with Man Of Steel) and emerges with a spear through his side, having given up his phone and left his family without their meal ticket. Lindelof also wrote the opening scenes of domestic bliss sustained with blood, so Clumsy is right that the film is 'anti-family' in that sense. But this only occurs after the plane explodes, and is totally divorced from the globetrotting zombie-shooting antics.

And even then, it's not quite enough. Despite Lindelof's best efforts, this is a liberal Brad Pitt Jesus, sitting in a first-class seat. By the end of the film, he'll be helping the UN distribute little humanitarian care packages while massacring the inhumans and piling them into mass graves. It's the Israel sequence all over again. Instead of being an authentic Jesus figure, Brad comes across as a poverty tourist, 'slumming it' so that he can blend in with 'the other half' - before immediately heading back to scrub his hands. Compare with, say, Land of the Dead and its zombie-proletarian revolution.

The film doesn't follow through on its own logic of joining the zombies through infirmity - crippling alcoholism, loss of limbs. Not this quick-fix stuff. Things return to normal extremely quickly, with the images of mass graves intercut with Brad hugging his wife again. Blood hanging over the bed. It's extremely cynical.

But even overlooking that, this film is incredibly, distractingly poorly-made. Things stick out, like the random, pointless flashback to the Korean doctor getting bit. I really enjoyed the stump-bandaging sequence because, during the entire dramatic actors' showcase, the extra in the seat beside them is just sitting there not interacting with them in any way. There's the dumb shot where the camera zooms down into the zombie's eyeball for some reason. A suicide is presented so elliptically that the dude may as well have walked offscreen to take a shit, were it not for the badly-looped dialogue.

As anyone who's seen The Dark Knight knows, having characters narrate what's going on is a sign of their mediocrity. It's a surefire way to make them seem comically dumb compared to the real heroes, who are on top of things. The problem, in this film, is that every character is the 'is that a bazooka?' guy. The monologue about North Korea and the 'tenth man' thing have little to do with anything, are a supreme example of 'tell don't show', and aren't even well-written.

As pointed out before, there's not one great shot in the entire movie. The zombies aren't threatening at all, and PG-13 has nothing to do with it. It's okay that they never figure out what the zombies are. The problem is we have no idea what they do. The opening sequence shows ants swarming over a corpse, slowly eroding it. Why can't you have the imagery of people being engulfed by the swarm and vanishing? It's easy to convey thst sort of threat without gore. See the cow being fed to the velociraptors in Jurassic park, for example!

In the entire first attack scene, the zombies just kinda pounce at people and hit their heads on windows. There's no sense of the geometry of the swarm, when the opening credits show imagery of animals flocking and herding (intertextuality with After Earth). There's no clear pattern to their movement, except in the handful of CGI wave shots that are so badly-integrated as to seem like non sequiturs. This is the most obvious gulf in style between a film's all-CG and live-action shots since The Avengers.

Earlier, I predicted that the film would resemble Inception, with the flood of zombies representing the breakdown of symbolic reality and the capitalist dreamstate. I was close, except the dream doesn't break down. The zombies are banal, and so is fighting them. Everything goes as planned, and there's surprisingly little surrealism. In fact we only see the monsters clearly when they're failing to attack anyone - which makes Pitt's revelatory flashbacks even more ridiculous. The zombies are such non-entities that it's like reading those 'Garfield Without Garfield' comic-strip edits. This movie is such a shameful trainwreck-style debacle that would've been a great camp joke it were fun to watch at all.