World War Z (2013)

Good escapist fun but way too frantic for its own good. I don't think I can point to even one element that was worth its salt here. Writing, editing, and acting all felt pretty below average. Ambitious, but ultimately a flop.

Never read the source material but I rarely care much about faithfulness to it anyway. A decent mega budget version of the zombie story. Not the best zombie movie ever but certainly the biggest in scope, and that counts for something.

Pitt's passable but satisfying cinematography struggles to save a soft story.

After listening to almost half of the audio book,I feel very qualified to rant about the movie's lack of faithfulness to the source material. Nah - I could give a shit. As a stand alone entity, I thought the the movie was very good. Kept me enthralled the whole way through.

A few plot holes and a little more suspension of disbelief than I would have preferred, but overall a decent enough movie. Slightly original storytelling bumps up the score a bit. It should be noted that I couldn't care less how similar or dissimilar the movie and the book are.

Overall great story - I haven't read the book but I've heard good things, and it seems like they adapted it it reasonably. Original, fast paced and sometimes scary, but if you watch Walking Dead you'll be immune to these zombies. Nowhere near as scary, too Hollywoodified.

The fatal flaw of most such films is the attempt to drag along the story of the wife & kids though the GD Zombie Apocalypse. There was some of that here, but it was balanced-out with some neat battle scenes and important plot/backstory.

Staunch adherence to the wrong parts of the source material make Z spread itself too thin in an attempt to check referential check boxes, rather than focus, or take inspiration from the source. Predictable and mostly inoffensive with glimmers of quality buried in tired tropes.

I seems like there are too many "zombie" movie these days, but this was a breath of fresh air. Not sure how Max Brooks fans will take it, but top to bottom this movie had me hooked.