World War Z was on the Netflix last night, so I made the mistake of watching it. It was terrible. Spoilers abound, so stop here if you care.
The dreadful biology was offensive. Even if the plot were compelling — it wasn’t — and the actors engaging — they weren’t — it would have driven me bughouse mad. As it was, this looked like a movie in which someone had a CGI routine to render frenzied mobs, and they just had to use it over and over again.
The central macguffin of the plot was to find Patient Zero of the zombie plague. Why, they don’t explain; it would be scientifically interesting to trace the lineage of the infectious agent, but they don’t even know for sure what it is (they guess, a virus — they haven’t isolated it). But medically it isn’t going to help, especially since this disease promotes total widespread destruction, and all they’re going to find in South Korea, where they initially thought it arose, is wreckage. Which is what they find.
They begin this quest at the behest of a pompous Harvard scientist, who is an idiot. Once they’re on the plane to Korea, he smugly informs everyone that Nature is a serial killer who likes to be found out, so she leaves clues everywhere, and you need ten years of training to be able to spot them. So Harvard teaches people to anthropomorphize diseases? Of course, this idiot trips and accidentally kills himself stepping off the plane (I cheered), and Brad Pitt proceeds to continue the mission without the benefit of ten years of Harvard graduate education, so he’s wrong on all levels.
Patient Zero wasn’t in South Korea. They are informed by an insane CIA agent that the earliest reports were from Israel. We can believe him because he is happily pulling his own teeth out and laying them out in a lovely pattern on a plate, so the whole crew piles back onto the plane to fly off to Jerusalem. It’s very important to find Patient Zero!
Once in Jerusalem, they learn that the plague didn’t start there: the Israelis have a policy of heeding every crazy rumor that comes down the pike, and when they heard a report of zombies running amuck in India, they immediately put up giant walls around the city. Which don’t work. As the zombies overrun Jerusalem, Brad Pitt hijacks a plane and flies to…India? No. Patient Zero is not that big a deal anymore. He flies to Wales.
Pitt has had an insight. The infectious agent makes its hosts very finicky — they won’t eat sick people, because they’d be undesirable new hosts. This is a pathogen that kills its victims and reanimates their dead corpses, but is incapable of coping with a bad case of the flu. It is exceptionally fastidious about infecting only the healthiest people, which it then drives into such a mad frenzy that they heedlessly leap off the roof of 20-story buildings to reach their prey, because it wants to maintain the highest quality hosts. So the zombies acquire exquisitely sensitive biosensors to detect and ignore people with diseases, but are completely blind to 200-foot drops.
So Brad Pitt gets to Wales in a jet full of infected zombies, conveniently getting it to land near a World Health Organization research facility by lobbing a hand grenade into the passenger compartment, causing all the zombies to get sucked out and forcing the plane to crash violently, breaking apart on contact with the ground. Fortunately, he’s in the one piece of the plane that is intact, along with an Israeli soldier he’d saved from the plague by chopping her hand off — apparently, not only does the pathogen hate sick people, it also turns up its nose at maimed people. Unfortunately, he has a gigantic shard of metal debris jammed through his guts and poking out his back. Fortunately, the movie will completely ignore this debilitating injury for the rest of its running time.
At the WHO facility, they discover a group of paranoid (who can blame them?) scientists, who inform them that the part of the lab with the really nasty diseases has been overrun by zombies, but that they’ve gone quiescent in the absence of victims. They can get to the store of deadly diseases if they proceed very, very quietly. So instead of sending someone hale and competent to fetch a few vials, they send 1) Brad Pitt, the guy who just had a giant metal spike pulled out of his abdomen, 2) the recently one-handed Israeli soldier, and 3) the director of the lab. The director turns out to be a mega-klutz who is constantly kicking things and knocking stuff over, so 2 & 3 end up running away, drawing off all the enraged zombies, while #1 skedaddles over to the Death Lab. It’s almost like they planned it.
Once in the Death Lab, Brad Pitt scoops up a box full of random vials, but he’s surrounded by zombies! He’s trapped! So he picks a vial, injects himself with it’s supposedly lethal contents, and presto — he becomes invisible to zombies, and strolls nonchalantly back to the safe lab, where they conveniently have an antidote that they give him. All better! Don’t you just love magic medicine?
Then the show wraps up rapidly with a brief announcement that they have some kind of meningitis-like vaccine that gives people the disease but doesn’t, so they’re all invisible to the zombies, and you can just walk among them and bash their heads in with crowbars and they won’t notice. I guess when Washington DC is destroyed and all those pesky politicians have been eaten, you get rid of all the annoying regulations that slow magic medicine development.
That was truly awful. I kept watching in disbelief that they could screw over biology and medicine so thoroughly. I haven’t read the book that this movie was based on, so now I’m wondering…was it true to the source? Was the book really this stupid?
No comments:
Post a Comment