World War Z

United Nations employee Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) traverses the world in a race against time to stop the Zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments, and threatening to destroy humanity itself.

Classifying this as a "zombie" movie is much the same as calling "21 Days Later" a zombie movie. The categorization is not wrong, but kit changes what we typically think of when we mean zombies. These are not lumbering oafs. These are lightning-fast creatures that seem to have some sort of collective intelligence, like a colony of bees. Their abilities (most notably climbing walls) are foreign to what zombies are.

Also, this should be seen as an action film first, horror film second, which seems to be the case any time Hollywood has millions of dollars to burn on a zombie film. See, for example, "I Am Legend". If you are looking to see Brad Pitt survive car accidents and plane crashes while traveling around the world (South Korea, Israel, Wales) this is a fine film. But if you want some scares or a film that embodies "survival horror", you will not get what you want.

Probably the most clever thing about this was the referral of zombies as "rakshasa", a Hindu demon that feeds on human flesh. Maybe this has already been covered in Bollywood, but it seems that the concept is rather new here. The zombies (or infected) in this film are not actually rakshasa, but it does raise the question: where are Hindu demons in the horror film? If we can have Onibaba and other Asian creatures, why not something from a country with over one billion people? But this is a bit of a sidetrack...

Anyway, good film if you want big budget action and Brad Pitt fighting computer-generated undead while sporting the greasiest hair since Kid Rock. Bad film if you want slow, lumbering Romero zombies. But to each his own, I guess.