Humans have been reproducing and are far from the risk of extinction. But “Mother Natures is a serial killer” and will eventually find a way to deplete earth’s continuously growing population. This is exactly what happened in World War Z. A rabies outbreak started to spread all over the world, turning healthy human beings into aggressive, flesh-biting people, hence the letter “Z“, which stands for “zombie“. However, the zombies here are a lot different from the traditional slow, corpse-like, decomposing, undead people. The walking dead here are agile, quick, more aggressive, and impervious to pain and fear (comparable with the Dawn of the Dead zombies), which added a nail-biting factor to the film. (SPOILER: Watch out for the black girl and the guy researcher zombies. There were funny moments, but the casting people must have been proud of their great acting.)
Being a zombie fan, I can say that the different attack and focus on the film set World War Z apart from other zombie movies. It tackles how different governments (politics) of the world would react to such outbreak, how the military would handle the situation, how the healthcare and medicinal industry would investigate and find a curative solution, and how mass hysteria could take over for survival. It dwells on the realistic and scientific aspect, and not much on the gory, blood-spurting, amputating, gut-eating side of a zombie movie. The film actually gave me a Contagion type of movie vibe, although not boring (no offense to Contagion fans). There was an attempt to capture the The Walking Dead feel in terms of emotions, but I’d have to say that it’s still not at par. (SPOILER) I have to admit though that I was on the edge of my seat during the last part when Gerry (Brad Pitt) had to acquire the cure.
There were nerve-wracking scenes that awed me, especially those that involved mass panic. I believe these were handled with authenticity. And the cinematography did not fail to impress me … how the cam would go wide and loud, and then focused and muffled. (SPOILER) Such scenes were when Gerry was finding clues about the virus, counting from 1 to 12, observing how long a person would change from alive to undead, and then amputating a soldier to find out if the virus would spread. Another one that I liked was the airplane scene. I thought it would be difficult to handle considering that there’s such a small space to make a good attack work. But no. I loved it.
As for the ending, unlike other zombie films, there was closure, and I was satisfied with it. Let’s just see if they’re going to make a sequel out of it.
All in all, I believe it’s a movie worth spending money on. But what made this movie more worthy is that the special screening was sponsored by Solaire Resort & Casino. They even had free items raffled. As expected, I didn’t win again. (I’m just not lucky in that department.) They also conducted a fun game (Bring Me). Unfortunately, I had none of the items mentioned by the host (necktie, umbrella, ball pen, etc.). Solaire is also giving away 14 million php and four Fortuners if you join the Solaire Rewards Club. For more details, visit their Web site at www.solaireresort.com.
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World War Z stars Brad Pitt and is directed by Marc Forster.
Article by Rhodney Teng
