Tuesday, June 4, 2013


Random Thoughts

WWZ has so far received mixed reviews which should actually help the film since months of bad buzz had people expecting a disaster.   It's not After Earth critically or even commercially.  The problem, as other have pointed out, is the film's cost and what it must earn to make that back.  The highest grossing horror film of all time is The Sixth Sense which made $672M worldwide, followed by Jaws which made $470M.  The highest grossing horror-adventure is The Mummy Returns which made $433M.   WWZ is probably less family-friendly than The Mummy series but it has a fighting chance to make $400M on the back of Brad's star power and decent word of mouth.

I guess the obvious question is why they decided to spend so much on a film that was not solid four-quadrant material.  Even before the reshoots, the budget was in the vicinity of $170M.  It probably shouldn't have been more than $130M.  Fast & Furious 6 cost $160M.

-- FussyK






Rising from an early grave of negative pre-release publicity, director Marc Forster and producer-star Brad Pitt’s much-maligned “World War Z” emerges as a surprisingly smart, gripping and imaginative addition to the zombie-movie canon, owing as much to scientific disaster movies like “The China Syndrome” and “Contagion” as it does to undead ur-texts like the collected works of George Romero. Showing few visible signs of the massive rewrites, reshoots and other post-production patchwork that delayed its release from December 2012, this sleekly crafted, often nail-biting tale of global zombiepocalypse clicks on both visceral and emotional levels, resulting in an unusually serious-minded summer entertainment whose ideal audience might be described as comicbook fanboys who also listen to “Democracy Now.” Opening a week apart from the more four-quadrant-friendly “Man of Steel” in most markets, “World War Z” should post solid enough numbers at home and abroad, but with a rumored final cost well north of $200 million, it’ll need more than a bit of kryptonite up its sleeve to push far into profitability.















World War Z: Film Review

12:11 PM PDT 6/4/2013 by Todd McCarthy

Brad Pitt delivers a capable performance in an immersive apocalyptic spectacle about a global zombie uprising.

Waves of startling action counterbalance standard one-man-saves-the-day Hollywood heroics in World War Z, an immersive apocalyptic spectacle that tosses the viewer into the deep end of a global zombie uprising and doesn't let up until close to the end. A bunch of impressive set-pieces stitched together rather than a good story convincingly told, this gargantuan production should ride Brad Pitt's name, teeming action scenes and widespread interest in all things zombie to strong box-office returns, particularly internationally. Whether it will be enough to compensate Paramount and the assorted producers for the $200 million-plus investment and all their production headaches is something they'll have to sweat out.

While date-night thrill-seekers should be amply satisfied by this ramrod, pedal-to-the metal confrontation with a zombie plague, fans of Max Brooks' 2006 best-seller will find much to be disappointed in. Subtitled “An Oral History of the Zombie War,” the savvy, engaging novel was written as a series of post-war interviews with people all over the world that provided a reasonably comprehensive and intriguingly political mosaic portrait of how and why the international calamity played out the way it did.

A faithful adaptation of the book would have structurally resembled Steven Soderbergh's 2011 global-reach thriller Contagion, just as it would have retained loads of political material that, as lead producer Pitt himself has bemoaned, is simply not compatible with the financial imperatives of a big-budget blockbuster. Exhibit A: Brooks (the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft) makes it clear that the zombie outbreak began in China; fearful that this little detail might prevent exhibition in the world's most populous nation, the filmmakers decided that China should go unmentioned.

What could have been an artistically ambitious, multi-perspective look at how modern ideological and religious disarray opened the door for catastrophe has, implausibly but understandably, been reduced to the story of a classic reluctant hero's effort to do what the collective global governments and science geniuses cannot: get to the root of why there are suddenly so many drooling, groaning, jerking and amazingly fast-moving ghouls running around the world interested only in feasting on their former fellow human beings.

Having committed to making the film a wire-to-wire exercise in eluding extreme jeopardy, director Marc Forster and his battery of screenwriters (Matthew Michael Carnahan of The Kingdom, Drew Goddard of Cloverfield and TV's Lost, Damon Lindelof of Star Trek Into Darkness, Prometheus and Cowboys & Aliens, as well as Lost, and screen story scribe and original adapter J. Michael Straczynski of Changeling and Thor) have worked out a scenario that feels more like a travel itinerary. Faced with gridlock in downtown Philadelphia that represents the havoc the undead are causing all over the world, retired United Nations troubleshooter Gerry Lane (Pitt) gets his wife Karen (Mireille Enos) and two daughters as far as Newark before his former boss Thierry (Fana Mokoena) sends a chopper to rescue them from a rooftop and spirit them to the temporary haven of command central aboard an Atlantic Ocean-based vessel.

 Although it's not entirely clear how Gerry's experience with terrorist actions in Chechnya and Africa make him the world's number one go-to guy to solve the zombie problem, the bearded, long-haired dude is instantly dispatched to rainy South Korea, where he advised that the North Koreans have cleverly nipped zombieism in the bud through mandatory nationwide teeth extraction. A tense attack drives Gerry back on the plane to head for Israel, the only nation that, as of now, is winning the war against the living dead. From the cockpit, Gerry is startled by what appears to be a nuclear mushroom cloud down below, an arresting vision, to be sure, but one that oddly goes unmentioned thereafter.

The subsequent siege of Jerusalem is unquestionably the great set piece of the film, a spectacular display of the chaotic but comprehensible victory of a staggering number of flesh-eaters finally surmounting the formidable barriers imposed by well-prepared defenders. Covered from all perspectives, from the jammed immigrations lines of sanctuary-seekers to the aerial views revealing the city's warren of ancient corridors and walls, the convulsive action climaxes with Gerry and a scared, wounded but capable female soldier, Segen (Daniella Kertesz), desperately climbing aboard the last plane out, a ride which itself becomes another visceral action interlude of a fairly high order.

Much has been made of how the final act, as originally shot, didn't pan out and was rewritten and refilmed at considerable expense. In the event, the scale and focus of the film is greatly narrowed in the climactic twenty minutes. Set at a top-secret medical research facility in Wales, the sequence is a fairly simple, reasonably well-executed cat-and-mouse game in which Gerry, Segen and a scientist are forced to sneak through a zombie-occupied building to grab a substance that may, or may not, hold the key to stemming the war's tide. The quiet, pared-down nature of the sequence contrasts strongly with everything that's gone before, which is not a bad thing, although the very ending rather flatly wraps everything up in a jiffy.

 There is certainly a tension running through the film between latent serious ambition and lowest-common-denominator-pleasing requirements, with the latter ruling the day most of the time without entirely erasing evidence of the former. Notwithstanding the expectation that the brave leading man and his adored family will somehow come out of it all unscathed, there are a few narrative surprises along the way and an absence of dumb, clunking dialogue that often infects such fare.

Aside from Pitt, who strides through it all capably and without leading man airs, the cast is fleshed out with mostly little-known actors. Gerry's wife,the U.N. boss and the Israeli soldier, for instance, could easily have been cast with names, but having relatively fresh, non-distracting faces in these roles plays well; Kertesz, in particular, gets a big chance with her part and makes the most of it.

On the craft side, it's easy to see where the money went, as scene after scene overflows with hordes of people (many of them CGI-generated) and elaborate backgrounds. The film is a feast for eyes (the 3D conversion is very good), while the zombie horror consists mostly of mild jolts rather than shocks. Ben Seresin receives sole cinematography credit, although Robert Richardson was the director of photography on the initial shoot. Marco Beltrami's score is almost always there to supply further adrenaline.






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