User:LancedSoul/sandbox/World War Z

World War Z is a 2013 American action horror film directed by Marc Forster, with a screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, and Damon Lindelof, from a story by Carnahan and J. Michael Straczynski, based on the title of the 2006 novel of the same name by Max Brooks. It stars Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator who travels the world gathering clues to find a way to stop a zombie pandemic. The ensemble supporting cast includes Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, Ludi Boeken, Matthew Fox, Fana Mokoena, David Morse, Elyes Gabel, Peter Capaldi, Pierfrancesco Favino, Ruth Negga, and Moritz Bleibtreu.

Pitt's Plan B Entertainment secured the film rights to Brooks' novel in 2007, and Straczynski was approached to write and Forster was approached to direct. In 2009, Carnahan was hired to rewrite the script. With a planned December 2012 release and a projected budget of $125 million, filming began in July 2011 in Malta, before moving to Glasgow in August and Budapest in October. The production suffered some setbacks, and, in June 2012, the release date was pushed back, and the crew returned to Budapest for seven weeks of additional shooting. Damon Lindelof was hired to rewrite the third act but did not have time to finish the script, and Drew Goddard was hired to finish the rewrite. The reshoots took place between September and October 2012, ballooning the budget to a reported $190 million, although some publications have listed it as high as $269 million.

The film premiered in London on June 2, 2013, and was chosen to open the 35th Moscow International Film Festival. It premiered in New York and Los Angeles on June 14 and was released elsewhere in the United States on June 21, in 2D and RealD 3D.

Plot
When former U.N. investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) and his family get stuck in urban gridlock, he senses that it's no ordinary traffic jam. His suspicions are confirmed when, suddenly, the city erupts into chaos. A lethal virus, spread through a single bite, is turning healthy people into something vicious, unthinking, and feral. As the pandemic threatens to consume humanity, Gerry leads a worldwide search to find the source of the infection and, with luck, a way to halt its spread.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Despite being rated PG-13, there are plenty of scary moments.
 * 2) *The airplane sequence. Good grief, the airplane sequence. It makes the scene awesome!
 * 3) *The roof scene - the fact that the lead zombie is Tommy's father - a man who moments ago was quiet-spoken and concerned about his family - turned into a mindless zombie trying to EAT his own child.
 * 4) **The scene before it, where they're all arguing with each other, then zombies start slamming against their front door, Tommy's father looks up with an expression that just screams the word.
 * 5) Brad Pitt's performance is awesome as Gerry Lane.
 * 6) While it is meant to be a horror film, there are some funny moments. For example.
 * 7) *Well Gerry, you just became invisible to zombies. Whatcha gonna do? Drink a Pepsi!
 * 8) **Although completely understandable considering he's been without food for a while, been under extreme duress and endless escapes, and just infected himself with a disease. Given that he finally has a chance to catch his breath, and is near a distraction he'll need anyway, it's funny in its humanness that he opts to drink one before carrying on.
 * 9) **You can practically hear the Mission Passed Respect + theme from GTA San Andreas.
 * 10) **Hey, it's probably going to be a while before anyone gets back to making soft drinks, so why not?
 * 11) **The zombies running past him, even pushing him aside to get at the noise. It even comes off as a perverse Pepsi commercial: "Zombies can't resist the great taste of Pepsi!"
 * 12) *Another example is that the moment when The Littlest AIDS Patient is dodged by zombies has a dark kind of humor, as he watches the zombies swarm for him, then break aside. It's like the movie's saying, "What's more evil than zombies? AIDS!"
 * 13) The ending montage of humanity's counteroffensive against the undead is awesome in the literal sense of the word.
 * 14) Gerry makes the simple act of walking badass given the situation at hand; Having theorized that the zombies ignore humans with terminal illnesses, he injects himself with a lethal contagion (with a roughly fifty-fifty chance of it being one without a cure) and becomes functionally invisible to the zombies. He then nonchalantly drinks a soda, dumps a few dozen cans on the floor, then walks through the mob of charging monsters like Moses through the Red Sea. One of the mindless freaks actually shoves him aside to attack the fallen soda cans!
 * 15) Awesome visual effects. This is a prime example of a story dictating visual effects, rather than CGI for the sake of CGI. Everything is practical until it's impossible to depict without FX.
 * 16) It was a good and realistic way to a revival of the zombie genre after most movies heavily unfocused on the zombie genre.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) A rather unfaithfulness to the source material.
 * 2) * In particular, the zombies in the film work on a fundamentally different level than the ones in the books, completely changing the course of the story.
 * 3) The CGI is outdated.

Critical and audience response
World War Z received positive reviews for Marco Beltrami's score, Brad Pitt's performance, and as a realistic revival of the zombie genre, but criticism for the anti-climax, outdated CGI, and lack of faithfulness to the source material. On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, World War Z has a 66% approval rating, based on 273 reviews, with an average rating of 6.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "It's uneven and diverges from the sourcebook, but World War Z still brings smart, fast-moving thrills and a solid performance from Brad Pitt to the zombie genre.". Metacritic has a weighted average score of 63 out of 100, based on reviews from 46 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of B+ on a scale of A to F.

Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a 3.5 out of 4, saying: "It's entertaining as hell" and provides "nearly non-stop action". Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film a 3 out of 4, saying that "the suspense is killer". Henry Barnes of The Guardian considered the film an "attempt at large-scale seriousness" in the zombie genre that resulted in a "punchy, if conventional action thriller." Writing for Variety, Scott Foundas found the film a "surprisingly smart, gripping and imaginative addition to the zombie-movie canon", which shows "few visible signs of the massive rewrites, reshoots and other post-production patchwork." Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter opined that "Brad Pitt delivers a capable performance in an immersive apocalyptic spectacle about a global zombie uprising." A. O. Scott of The New York Times said, "[It] does not try to extend the boundaries of commercial entertainment but does what it can to find interesting ways to pass the time within them." Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times remarked that "World War Z plays a bit like a series of separate films and the juncture where the new final act was grafted onto the proceedings is unmistakable, but unless you knew about the film's troubled past, you'd never guess it existed."

In a negative review, Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News said that World War Z "is no summer thriller. It's an anemic actioner that fosters excitement like dead limbs as it lumbers toward a conclusion." Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph thought the film had been affected by its troubled development, observing that "the final product has an elaborate uselessness about it", and the film has "no heart to be found amid the guts." Alonso Duralde of TheWrap said: "For all its effectiveness at portraying the horror of possible human extinction, the film's actual humans are so soulless that this could just as well be the movie version of the video game Plants vs. Zombies."

Box Office
The film grossed $202.4 million in North America and $337.6 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $540 million. Variety called it a "bona-fide box office hit", although Deadline Hollywood later said it "barely broke even".

In North America, the film earned $25.2 million on its opening day, including $3.6 million from Thursday night and midnight shows. It went on to earn $66.4 million its opening weekend, finishing second to Monsters University at the box office. This was, at the time, the second-largest opening weekend for a film that did not debut in the first place (behind The Day After Tomorrow (2004) with $85,807,341), the largest opening weekend for a film starring Brad Pitt, and the sixth-largest opening among films released in June.

In other territories, the film earned $5.7 million on its opening day (Thursday, June 20, 2013) and $45.8 million on its opening weekend, ranking in third place.

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