World War Z

A film set in the first days of a global outbreak. Gerry is a former United Nations investigator. He is in the car in traffic with his family when the city comes apart in a moment. The outbreak is fast. A bitten person turns in twelve seconds, and that figure is the most important information in the film. The family is taken aboard a ship. In exchange Gerry is asked to work again: he will find where the disease began. From there the film is a travel story. A military base in Korea, a walled city in Israel, an aeroplane, and a laboratory in Wales. What the narrative is interested in is not horror but logistics: the film is concerned with evacuation, quarantine, vaccines and borders rather than fighting creatures. The siege sequences are crowded. Bodies pile on each other and climb a wall, and that image became the film's signature. The last section is small. A few corridors in a laboratory and an almost single-handed silence; after all the scale, that choice saves the film. The production was troubled. The ending that was shot was not liked, and the last third was rewritten and reshot; the laboratory section is the product of that. The source is Max Brooks's novel. The book is made of spoken testimony from around the world and has almost nothing to do with the film's structure. Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz and Peter Capaldi are in the cast. Marc Forster directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes large-scale disaster films. Who it is not for: anyone who read the book; the film takes only the title and the idea.