465. World War Z (2013)

Starring: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz

Director: Marc Forster

Running Time: 116 mins

World War Z is an American film about a former UN employee who must travel across the world to find a way of stopping a worldwide zombie pandemic that threatens all of human life.

There was nothing particularly spectacular about this film. It’s that sort of big-budget Hollywood blockbuster whose visuals again prevail over the story, however it wasn’t terribly disappointing in that aspect, with some exciting sequences that save it from being a total failure.

I have to say that this film was just too clichéd to get me at all engaged. It’s your typical zombie apocalypse story that is just completely predictable pretty much all the way through, filled with ridiculous gore and a lot of waiting.

That’s one thing that really annoyed me about this film, the fact that there was just so much waiting. It’s more of a flaw with the whole zombie genre, but here, there are such large parts of the film which are dedicated to empty waiting periods, where there’s in fact very little tension created, making it often extremely boring to watch.

Another strange problem with this film was that it was unexpectedly gruesome. Of course, zombie stories are always pretty gory visually, but as an atmosphere and a tone, this film is in fact quite dark and depressing, talking about how humankind is in fact very weak in the grand scale of things, and that notion really depressed me while watching this.

However, one positive of this film was the finale. It was a seriously exciting, tense and often frightening sequence with both fast-paced action and tension-filled stand-offs between humans and zombies, that was really engaging to watch.

The end of this seems like a totally different film in terms of the quality, but the rest really is your stereotypical, predictable zombie story that doesn’t bring anything particularly spectacular to the table, so that’s why it gets a 6.7.