World War Z - Movie Review

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.

Random TV Stuff - 6/15/13

HBO's GAME OF THRONES - I watched Season 3 all within a week and a half. Love that series. Love its faithfulness to the books, and yet it has its own surprises.  Really liked the chemistry between Jon Snow and Ygritte, between Jaime and Brienne, between Margery and Joffrey, between Tyrion and Sansa, between Arya and the Hound, between Dany and her dragons. Obviously it's not all romantic chemistry, but the actors and characters are well-matched.

Season 1 was Book 1, Season 2 was Book 2, and Season 3 has been about the first 60% of Book 3.  Now as to the next few seasons, I think they're going to take the events of the rest of Book 3, and then Books 4 & 5, and tell the events chronologically.  I think we'll see elements from Books 3, 4 and 5 all in Season 4, just due to the nature of the way they were written.  It also means that some seasons are going to see shorter shrift from certain characters.  For instance, I don't know what the producers think they're going to do with Theon, but after watching him get tortured for all of Season 3, I don't want a whole other season or two of it, and based on future events I'm aware of, it's a while before his situation improves. (In the books, I don't think he's even in Books 3 or 4).

Now I feel like I want to reread them.

AMC's THE KILLING - I'm really enjoying the setup this season.  It's already better than the first two seasons.  Linden (Mireille Enos) and Holder (Joel Kinnaman) are back on a case tracking a serial killer exhibiting an M.O. of a killer (Peter Sarsgaard) already on death row.  It still has that patented moroseness, but this time they've promised the case will be solved this season, and so far so good.

NBC's THE GOODWIN GAMES - Wealthy patriarch (Beau Bridges) dies and leaves a series of challenges to his three adult children in order to determine who gets his inheritance.  The three of them aren't really mean or self-absorbed, but since this has already been cancelled, no need to see just what hoops they have to jump through.

NBC's SAVE ME - Anne Heche stars in this comedy about a woman who has a near-death experience and decides to change her ways, but she also has episodes where she can read others' thoughts.  It was hammy and I couldn't make it through a full episode.

FOX's DOES SOMEONE NEED TO GO? - One of those sadistic reality shows where employees at a company are asked to vote on who they think should get fired.  It's worse than the "emperor hanging out with the peasants" aspect of Undercover Boss.  It's amazing to see all these companies where they're all Americans, in the same building, working side-by-side. (I'm used to my co-workers being all over the world.)