![]() ![]() In World War Z, Gerry and his family are trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic and forced to see shelter as people run from some unseen horror, which quickly makes itself known as infected humans run rampant through the streets. It is traditional for movies within the zombie subgenre of horror to have at least one nail-biter of a scene showing what happens when the outbreak hits close to the protagonist's home. While the credits of World War Z are bit extra, with news clips and reality TV clips blending into a cacophony of blissfully ignorant panic, the opening sequence introducing us to Gerry, his wife Karin ( Mireille Enos), and their daughters Rachel ( Abigail Hargrove) and Constance ( Sterling Jerins) before proceeding to take us through their first brush with the virus is perfectly orchestrated. This current, surreal reality we're living in is a major reason why World War Z feels so accessible right now the circumstances are near-perfectly mirrored. Seen through the eyes of Gerry Lane (Pitt), a former UN employee put back on the frontlines to help find a cure, the story of World War Z begins to take a global angle. Flesh is of little concern here, just infecting healthy folks at all costs. The zombies of Brooks' World War Z are very much the zombies of the World War Z movie: Fast-moving, ravenous, and programmed purely to spread the virus. While it doesn't necessarily directly adapt the stories in Brooks' novel, it does take the same basic idea - analyzing a virus-based zombie outbreak through a geopolitical lens - and breathes life into it with a new set of characters and situations. Michael Straczynski wrote the first script, with Matthew Michael Carnahan doing a rewrite, and later Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard coming in for third act rewrites, with Goddard ultimately penning the ending - and a laborious shoot, complete with seven weeks of reshoots, helped to create an aura of curiosity around the movie by the time it premiered.ĭespite the long road to theaters, World War Z delivers. ![]() Multiple screenwriters - Babylon 5 creator J. In the industry, the World War Z movie is perhaps best remembered not for what ended up on the screen, but for the arduous production process that came before it. The novel was styled as a Studs Terkel-esque collection of reports gathered from various individuals across globe in the years following a fast-spreading zombie virus which completely reshaped every facet of human existence. World War Z may feel like a distant memory considering it was practically infamous by the time it got to theaters. The movie was adapted from the 2006 Max Brooks novel of the same. For my money, World War Z is as good a "pondering a pandemic" sort of film as Contagion or Outbreak, but arguably does better than both when it comes to comforting you as you watch by rooting it in a genre which is still a few steps removed from our reality. The only movie really doing it for me when it comes to finding something soothing to latch onto even when it's telling an intense, somewhat relatable, pandemic story is 2013's World War Z - and I think you should watch it now, too. After all, movies are the ultimate "What if?" scenario, right? Maybe we want to see how it would all play out, this pandemic business, and how humanity could solve it. ![]() But if the surge in interest for revisiting pandemic-related movies like Contagionand Outbreak in recent weeks can tell us anything, it's the surprising truth that maybe we just want to feel like we're not alone in this. And it might feel counterintuitive right now to want to watch something a little nerve-jangling, or perhaps something which hits closer to the bone than expected. It feels easy to succumb to your own internal "Panic Mode" right now believe me, I totally get it.
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