WORLD WAR Z

Max Brooks' book "World War Z" is a masterwork thriller. It drips information about the zombie apocalypse to the reader through short stories, so that as you read the survivors' accounts you piece together a much bigger story. It would make a brilliant anthology series on HBO. They could hand chapters off to individual filmmakers to adapt into hour-long episodes.

But that is not what happened. Rumour is that there was an earlier script that would have made this film 3+ hours and hewn much closer to the book's structure. The rumour also says that it would have been the first Oscar-worthy zombie film.

But that is not what happened. Instead, the filmmakers behind World War Z, including producer Brad Pitt, have looked at the macro-political story that Max Brooks wrote and wrote a Hollywood hero into it. Brad Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a former UN agent who is drafted to find a cure. Forced away from his family to globe-trot the apocalypse, he deals with a variety of situations borrowed equally from zombie films and apocalypse disaster movies.

Plenty of fans of the novel will be disappointed by this. But the fact that the movie follows a new character while (roughly) following the bigger story of the book means that the characters of the novel are out there. They are facing their own apocalypses. They just didn't cross paths with Brad Pitt. Sequels or (hopefully) an HBO series could give them their time on screen, but for now we have this film starring Brad Pitt.

As far as films starring Brad Pitt go, this one is quite good. It didn't try to be funny, which most zombie films do, and the resulting tone was closer to Contagion than Dawn of the Dead. Brad Pitt is a solid leading man as usual. Mireille Enos (The Killing) is his wife, and in her short time on screen she manages to be a competent survivor.

Something that often sinks apocalypse films is a transparently manipulative character. The screaming blond in Jaws 2 should have been the first one eaten, but she stubbornly survives to annoy the audience to the end. Fred Astaire's part in The Towering Inferno was specifically designed to break your heart. 2012 was hemorrhaging selfish and annoying characters to hate. These cheap emotional manipulations reveal bad scripts more often than bad actors, so it was nice to see World War Z did not burden its good cast with cheap tricks.

Perhaps we will see a WWZ adaptation some day, but for now there is a solid zombie thriller starring Brad Pitt that happens to use the same title.