World War A,B,C.

*WARNING* While this is primarily a review of the movie World War Z, chances are I will give away a couple of minor spoilers, and if you haven't seen this movie... this may not be a post that you would want to read. I figured I'd give you guys a fair warning, considering I will be doing this sort of review type thing fairly often.

To start off with, I'd like to commend Marc Forster for not taking the "Cloverfield way out" and allowing the primary amount of action to occur within the first ten minutes. I mean, to backtrack to the year 2008 when Cloverfield was first introduced to us. This was the first "apocalyptic" movie of sorts in the long stretch of those sorts of movies where something comes into a highly populated city that either devours and dements every living thing to cross it's path or it completely and utterly destroys the city, leaving 60 of the 90 minutes to just mindless looters running amuck. (Side-note: How cool would it have been to have been an extra for one of those movies, where you can just throw mailboxes into store windows and clamber into the grocery store without any repercussions?) Anyway, the writer of Cloverfield, Drew Goddard, redeemed himself greatly when he co-wrote for World War Z, which starred the scarf and long hair sporting Brad Pitt, along with some not-so-familiar but all-the-more intriguing faces such as Mireille Enos and absolute badass, Daniella Kertesz.

Let me just start by pointing out some little quirks that I've noticed a good number of these sorts of "something is taking over the world" movies have. They always have a child with some sort of illness that can't be helped by anything other than albuterol. This was shown in Signs when the son of Mel Gibson's character was unable to reach his inhaler and, thankfully, that wound up saving his life (am I the only one who thought that the scariest moment in that movie was actually when Mel Gibson yelled at everyone at the dinner table? I get goosebumps just thinking about it...) as the alien's weird finger that opened up from the nail bed and released some sort of poison into the boy's open nose and mouth couldn't get past his closed airways. Well, this was once again brought up in World War Z as the eldest daughter had an asthma attack of her own after she witnessed countless people die and watched as her dad hijacked an RV and the previous owner was convulsing into an undead fit as the family drove off into the blood red sunset.

That's not the only similarity, there are less examples of this but at the same time, the examples can be changed and altered in even the slightest bit that still add up to the same thing. There is almost always that family, normally it's a small non-english speaking family with just one child, and other times it is just a couple of rotten kids who won't listen to you when your name is Brad Pitt and you're telling them "We need to move, sitting still means certain death." In this case, it was a small hispanic family with one child, and as certain as they were about staying right where they were, they certainly did, and they certainly died. Another example of this is the ever-so-classic movie Titanic, in which Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio's character are running towards the deck, or at least trying, when they come across a small crying child who Leo hastily takes into his arms, soon to be taken out by a non-english speaking man who runs in the opposite direction with the child. And as sure as he was that he was getting his child and himself out of the way of danger, they were surely dead within the next five seconds.

Now, taking a bit of a sidestep off of the protagonists of this movie. Let me just talk about Daniella Kertesz's phenomenal performance as a certified badass. At first, I was sure that there was some sort of G.I. Jane crossover, considering her crawling, shooting, and running skills were impeccable. I was also rooting for her and Brad's character a bit more than I was rooting for him and his wife... considering she decided to go against his orders, rather, his comment that "He would call HER everyday." and called him instead, which then "awoke the dead" killing oodles of people including can't-seem-to-get-anything-good-since-LOST Matthew Fox.

Going back to similarities, if there is ever a dog in an abandoned building where people are hiding, or in this case, on a plane, or in other scenarios, in a completely desolate city (such as I Am Legend or even Signs for that matter) or anything in-between the combination of those, you can be rest-assured that there is probably a member of the undead or a creature from the unknown, and that dog will find it. In this case and point, it was a tiny, annoying dog, and I was rooting for it to sacrifice itself, or just be eaten, whichever came first. But, no, this blonde stewardess took it for the team.

Included is a picture of two of the four pages of notes taken during the movie. I do this so that I am not mindlessly typing away on Twitter or something along those lines, and instead, am practicing my chicken scratch handwriting so that I have it as reference when I go to review it on here.

All in all, World War Z was a great movie. The effects used on the "undead" were a bit different than those that I have seen in past zombie-affiliated movies and I was pleasantly surprised with Brad Pitt's performance considering I have had a love/hate relationship with him up until I saw him in Inglorious Basterds and fell madly, madly in love and forevermore repented my feelings of hate. I enjoyed the tossup of new faces as well as some old ones mixed in with those that portrayed non-english speaking characters actually being from/having acted in movies of their said origin. If I were to give the movie a rating on a scale from "wait to see it on DVD" to "go see it opening weekend", I'd say go see it the weekend after opening weekend.