"Movement is life."
World War Z is much better than its troubled production and delayed release would suggest, but it still feels like a good salvage job rather than a completely satisfying film. There is very little scene-setting before everything goes to hell, and unpredictable kinetic camerawork helps to generate the sense of swift chaos and threat of the rapid rabid virus-transmitters - the fast-gestating virus creates the pure desire to infect healthy potential hosts here rather than eat their brains - to the extent that the lack of gore on display is mostly made up for by the constant threat of being imminently overwhelmed. The big set pieces of the fall of Jerusalem and the aeroplane disaster are terrific, but the newly-written final sequence goes small and intimate in scale rather than the originally-planned huge Moscow showdown, and whilst fairly effective in conventional horror terms (even if the logic seems questionable), this large-scale large-budget film lacks the big ending to which it seems to be building and eventually limps along to the finishing line. This is very much Brad Pitt's film, and as usual he is good if intensely one-note, and apart from a well-pitched cameo by the wonderful David Morse, no-one else really makes any impression. Marco Beltrami provides one of his stronger scores, the colour palette is grimly dank, and the CGI are surprisingly effective in the full context of the film, and whilst the overall components are good, the script and overall shape of the film don't quite get there.
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