Much like the film's antagonists "World War Z" is the movie that can't be killed. It went took a score of screenwriters many drafts to adapt Max Brook's novel, a significant amount of reshoots after the original ending was panned and a six month delay but the film is finally set to be released this weekend to mostly positive reviews, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The film seems to be as influenced by medical films about disease as much as it does the zombie genre, according to the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday.
"Be prepared for a relatively grown-up, modestly intelligent and refreshingly un-bombastic thriller that owes as much to medical tick-tocks such as 'Outbreak' and 'Contagion' as it does to '28 Days Later' and the seminal works of George Romero," Hornaday said. "It deserves some credit for refusing to buy into the current cinematic arms race in Biggest, Loudest and Dumbest."
The Brad Pitt film has been lauded for, not surprisingly, the performance of Pitt. Mick LaSalle from the San Francisco Chronicle said that the film produced "real disturbance and unease."
"At the center of the movie, Pitt is everything he needs to be - the face that catches your eye in a crowd, believable in action, human and thoughtful, and as pretty as the zombies are ugly," LaSalle said. "He is an exalted, but casual, representative of the human race. He also knows how to listen and let the featured players have their moments."
Owen Gleiberman, of Entertainment Weekly, believed that Pitt fit the role of Gerry Lane perfectly as the character travels the world in an attempt to find the source of the zombie apocalypse.
"As Gerry, Pitt is cool, fearless, tense, compassionate and brutally tough," Gleiberman said. "He's feral grace under pressure."
David Edelstein from Vulture was far less kind to Pitt's performance and the movie as a whole saying that it goes from "'World War A+' to 'World War Zzzzzzzzz.'"
"For an actor with limited histrionic resources, Brad Pitt has taken a lot of chances in his career," Edelstein said. "But without a character, he's back to that soft, appraising, Robert Redford Jr. stare, his mouth half open as if he's about to speak but plainly with nothing on his mind apart from, 'This is what a movie star looks like without any lines.' The ghouls are having deeper thoughts."
Rotten Tomatoes has given the movie a score of 68 percent with an audience score of 86 percent.
"It's uneven - and fans of the book may be annoyed by how thoroughly it diverges from the source material - but 'World War Z' still brings smart, fast-moving thrills and a solid performance from Brad Pitt to the zombie genre," Rotten Tomatoes said.
