Film Review | World War Z

We were all proud when Brad Pitt chose Malta as one of the locations for his high concept zombie thriller... but then the project went south, and the strain is more than evident in the final cut.

It's all well and good to want to do something differently, especially when the subject in question is a well-trodden genre like the zombie film.

Having undergone something of a revival in recent years - with properties like 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead improving on the shuffling monsters' schlocky reputation, and Shaun of the Dead successfully, and lovingly, lampooning it - it's clear that the public likes their dose of the rotting, brain-eating undead, for whatever reason.

But this also means that zombies, already physically decomposing, are fast becoming culturally stale.

Which is probably why the efforts of novelist Max Brooks - son of beloved Hollywood satirist Mel Brooks and author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - were so warmly welcomed.

'World War Z' in particular mined a furrow never properly explored by previous iterations of the zombie tale. Instead of localised terror by shuffling undead hoards - as in George Romero's iconic '...Living Dead' series - the book presented the zombie apocalypse through the lens of individual 'eyewitness' accounts from across the globe, so that instead of simply serving up clichéd sensationalist terror, Brooks got to delve into weighty themes such as American isolationism and survivalism.

Perhaps nudged by the fact that World War Z ended up becoming a New York Times Bestseller - spawning a high-end audiobook voiced by John Turturro, Alan Alda and Mark Hamill - Brad Pitt snatched up the rights to novel, under the banner of his own production company Plan B, while also casting himself as the film's star and opting to shoot a chunk of it in Malta.

He may have had the best intentions in midwifing an adaptation of the sprawling, satirical novel - hand-picking Monster's Ball director Marc Forster was a ballsy move, for one, given that the only big-budget action film on his CV was Craig-Bond Part Deux: Quantum of Solace (2008).

But whether it was a case of excessive studio interference or just bad creative management, the film ran into big trouble pretty early on - pushing its initial December 2012 release date to this month to accommodate rewrites and subsequent reshoots.

Sadly, the strain is more than evident in the finished product.

Compacting the fragmented nature of its source material into a more conventional 'hero' narrative, the film presents Brad Pitt as newly-retired United Nations agent Gerry Lane, who is pulled away from the cosy confines of his family abode after a mysterious pandemic seemingly engulfs the entire world.

Turning people into shambling, aggressive hoards, the mysterious contagion needs fixing fast, and Gerry's former superiors quickly quarantine his family aboard a safe aircraft carrier and order him to help suss out the origin of the fast-spreading disease.

Working on a largely improvised plan by his UN superiors, Gerry helicopters across the world with a scientist and a small army in tow, collecting clues while the world falls apart.

But what he discovers in Jerusalem - which Malta served as a backdrop for - may just turn the tide of the incoming apocalypse... if Gerry can execute his 'cunning plan' in time, that is.

The 'Brad Pitt saves the world' shtick is already bad enough, and a pretty obscene betrayal of the book's far more mature narrative thrust. What's worse is that Forster never quite manages to bring to life the film's ambitious brief: to treat the zombie apocalypse as an international medical pandemic - no more, no less.

Whether you pin it down to a genuine failure of the imagination or World War Z's well-publicised production cock-ups doesn't really matter at this point. The end result is muddled and deeply unsatisfying. The rambling story makes you feel as though they're making it up as they're going along (a key twist that adds much-needed urgency appears far too late in the game), and there are far too many unforgivable - and giggle-inducing - missteps along the way (you'll notice them when you see them).

What makes the affair all the more tragic is that the premise, and even some individual sequences,  show immense promise. Were it not for the fact that it was preceded by a plodding and dramatically unsatisfying bulk of film, the climactic set-piece - a video-gamey bit of zombie cat-and-mouse - is great fun to watch, and the initial reveal of the pandemic - appearing out of nowhere while Gerry and his family are stuck in a traffic jam - packs genuine dread.

But best laid plans, and all that.

It's just frustrating that most of us could probably easily piece together a better film in our heads without trying all that hard.

After all, a key sequence is shot around Valletta and Marsa. Maybe a low budget, locally-produced YouTube offering is imminent?