Starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, Ludi Boeken, David Morse, Fana Mokoena, Peter Capaldi, Pierfrancesco Favino, Sterling Jerins, Abigail Hargrove, David Andrews and Matthew Fox. Directed by Marc Forster.★★★½
I haven't read the source material, but what I see in front of me works. It's a globetrotting view of the zombie apocalypse. We've seen zombie-outbreak movies that focus on one area and they only vaguely hear of it happening in the rest of the world. This time we follow a protagonist, Gerry Lane, (Brad Pitt) who starts in Philadelphia but goes to South Korea and to Israel and to Wales trying to find out what's going on and how to stop it.
It starts small, with Gerry and family stuck in traffic, but then like a wave it hits, and these are the fast-running kind of zombies. They cooperate like army ants and wash through the streets like a flash-flood. There's big emphasis on Gerry getting his family to a safe place. Once that happens, he takes back his old job as a UN special-ops guy to fly with a scientist to see if they can trace the origins of the zombie outbreak. If they can find the origin, maybe they can find a cure.
The PG-13 rating means we don't get a lot of gore. Stabs to the head are off-camera. We do still get a well-paced procedural, surprising considering all the production turmoils it went through. I also liked how just as the scale was getting larger and larger, Act III narrows its focus and zooms in on a WHO building in Wales.
I'd like to know why Matthew Fox was all but edited out of this movie. If I didn't know he was in it, I don't know if I would have recognized him.
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