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I went through a phase
where I was absolutely sick to death of zombies and zombie movies,
until I came to understand that they are now, and perhaps always will
be, a dominant fixture in the pop culture landscape. They figure in
about half of all movies made in the last ten years, they're in
almost every video game (fine by me because I stopped gaming years
ago), they're the premise of a hit TV series, I can count on most of
the Halloween costumes I see being zombies, and people still tell
zombie jokes on the internet. It's just the way things are, and I'll
have to get used to it. On some level I wish everyone would drop the
subject and find something else to amuse themselves; zombies are way
past being hip or edgy, but they've become so rooted in the popular
imagination that they're now as much a part of the consumer landscape
as Burger King and Windows. I've more or less made my peace with it,
but only because I have to if I want to enjoy contemporary
entertainment.
In that spirit, I'll
say that World War Z is a fine example of the genre as it
stands today, even if it doesn't have anything new to say in respect
to undead people shambling around taking bites out of the living.
The only goal here was to make a fast, rollicking horror/adventure
movie with tons of zombies and a lot of gunfire and explosions, and
they accomplished that perfectly well. Where they depart from
standard-issue zombie fare is in the epic scope they bring to the
story; events start in Philedelphia, then move to South Korea,
Israel, and finally the UK. Everything that happens is big and
intense, with zombie hordes attacking in writhing, spastic waves,
providing the film with some of its most memorable visuals. The
undead here are of the 28 Days Later/Zack Snyder's Dawn of
the Dead variety, running and jumping and swarming like Olympic
athletes jacked up on crystal meth. The action has a feverish,
skin-of-your-teeth quality that rarely lets up, and when it does
start to wind down a little toward the end, it comes as something of
a refreshing change of pace.
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Where World War Z
fails is in its almost total lack of inspiration. I haven't read the
novel it's based on, but the impression I get is that it has an
episodic structure revolving around stories told by the survivors of
a worldwide zombie epidemic. That's original, but none of it
shows up on screen. Instead, we get the heavily-armed living
struggling against the relentless living dead, a scenario so old it
collects Social Security checks. World leaders and the military are
at a loss, and there's a race against time to find a cure for
zombie-itis. Nothing new there. I know less discerning fans don't
look for subtlety, but if producers want to push back against the law
of diminishing returns, they need a fresh approach. Humans vs.
Zombies isn't going to cut it in the long run, even if it looks
epically humongous. What saves the movie from feeling like little
more than a big budget remake of 28 Days Later are good
performances, particularly from Mr. Pitt, a fast pace, well-written
characters, and unique imagery. I won't get the picture of zombies
piling and scuttling up a wall like ants out of my head any time
soon.
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I have to admit to a
few biases when it comes to zombie flicks. I saw the original Night
of the Living Dead (the movie that created the modern
zombie if you ignore Vincent Price's The Last Man on Earth) on
Halloween night when I was nine years old, and it had an indelible
impact on my still-growing brain. Nothing since has ever recreated
the grim, apocalyptic, unearthly feel of that movie for me, an effect
achieved mainly through black-and-white cinematography, stilted
acting, and a low budget. Not even Romero's follow-up Dawn of the
Dead has the same power, though it did up the ante by employing
Peckinpah-esque bullet hits and full-color guts. The later forays of
Lucio Fulci into zombie cinema are fun, surreal, and a serious trip
to watch, but generally feel more silly than scary. Living
Dead is the first movie I know of to show the dead as literal
ghouls who feed on the living, and while other movies have been more
graphic in their depiction of the same material, none have done it
more memorably (it's that freaky-ass music that does the trick).
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An interesting trend
I've noticed in the zombie genre over the last several years is a
tendency to tone down the gore, a weird development when you take
into account that extreme gore was a primary selling point of zombie
movies when the idea was new. Each new entry tried to out-splatter
the last, culminating eventually in the ultra-gory finale of Romero's
otherwise boring Day of the Dead, and some years later with
Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, a film that was so overwhelming in
its broad comedy and explosive, manic gross-out pyrotechnics that I
naively assumed, right up to the point when Danny Boyle and Zack
Snyder resuscitated the genre, it would be the final word in zombies.
Clearly that hasn't been the case, and the next generation of
dramatists have evidently decided that explicit blood and guts isn't
the way to go. I was actually surprised at how tame Snyder's Dawn
of the Dead was in comparison to the original, and the same goes
for most of the recent crop of zombie flicks. One exception is Shaun
of the Dead, which holds back on the gore until one character has
his intestines pulled out by an undead mob, even giving us a good
look at his empty body cavity as he dies screaming. That one bit is
as shocking as anything Romero or Fulci ever did.
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You don't have to think
on it very long to understand that the main motive behind cleaning up
the buckets of blood is to increase ticket and DVD sales. For all
its entertainment value, World War Z has a PG-13 rating and
barely a drop of blood. Producers want the maximum number of
moviegoers to see this stuff, and most people don't want to be
alienated by exploding heads and flopping entrails. Diehard
gorehounds can seek out more obscure, unrated titles, but zombies are
now officially for the masses. In the same way that the iconography
of punk rock and death metal has long been co-opted by unthreatening
bands on the Billboard charts, the zombie movie is now a relatively
safe mainstream product, suitable for Disney and children's costumes.
Much like zombies themselves, the commodification of formerly
obscure subcultures is not going away any time soon. One more thing
old-school fans will have to learn to make their peace with.
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