World War Z (2013) - Marc Forster

Gerry Lane left his job as one of the United Nation's topinvestigators to be closer to his family.  Father of two young girls, and loving husband, Gerry has settled in nicely being the homemaker of the family.  When a global pandemic presents itself, crippling countries overnight, Gerry is called back into action to help save humanity from what can only be described as an impending Zombie apocalypse.  Marc Forster's World War Z is the latest film to go through production problems which were made very public by the media.  Fortunately, whatever problems were prevalent seem to have been either fixed or overblown, as World War Z is a fast-paced, thrilling blockbuster that succeeds far more than it fails.  The film wastes no time throwing the viewer into the mayhem, getting to the outbreak within the first 10 minutes of the film.  What I was most impressed with was how well the film handled the government response to the epidemic.  While so many films pretend that our government would respond is a nonsensically humane way, World War Z captures the touch decisions and moral complications something this catastrophic would entail.  The best example of this being how the military threatens to take Gerry Lane and his family back to the mainland if he doesnt help, saying "Everyone on this ship is vital to our survival and performs a valuable service".   I could see some people having a problem with the CGI zombies, but they were well designed - moving like insects, consuming everything in their path.  The film has a few painfully ex-positional moments and struggles a bit with the drama centered around getting Pitt back to his family but the biggest problem lies in its rating.  While I totally understand the desire to make the film PG-13 for box office reasons, there are just far too many sequences that were noticeable altered via editing or framing to avoid the violence.  World War Z is an enjoyable blockbuster thriller that is rather epic in scale, I just wish it could have been rated R.
7/10

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