World War Z Reviews
Top CriticAs both thrilling spectacle and escapist summer entertainment, World War Z is enormously effective, with Brad Pitt at the center hopscotching the globe in search of the origin of a zombie apocalypse.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Pitt conducts himself manfully throughout the proceedings -- he is never less than believable while facing off against this pandemic -- but if I never see another zombie in the movies, I will not feel deprived.
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| Original Score: B-
If you need proof that sometimes more can be less, here you go.
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| Original Score: 2/4
As compelling as Pitt is at reflecting the world's pain through Lane's eyes, the movie treats him too often as if he truly is the only one with loved ones to lose or a world to save.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
World War Z opens with an undeniable bang. But if this is the way the world ends, we're going out with a whimper.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Despite some conventional passages and a soft ending, Forster and Brad Pitt, who is a producer of the film as well as its star, pulled the picture together. They also managed to reawaken in a large-scale movie the experience of shock.
Director Marc Forster can't do much with the stale human story, in which Pitt leaves his frightened wife and daughters on an aircraft carrier to await his return.
Z has guts and energy. It starts its mayhem early and it never lets up.
World War Z is a perfectly decent thriller, the smartest and most sober action film so far this summer and a grown-up addition to the zombie canon.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Whatever problems World War Z encountered in its making, the movie has made it to theaters not dead on arrival, but walking dead, running dead, and - when it's really working - swarming dead.
The result is a movie that, while no classic, can be credited with giving the audience something a bit more substantive than the usual disposable summer fare.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Against considerable odds, the ability and professionalism of the cast and crew have carried the day.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
[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.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Given how efficiently World War Z has delivered jolts and screams over the course of its sleek 116-minute running time, it's easy to forgive [its] rushed and slightly muted finale.
This enjoyable shambles of a sci-fi thriller, directed by Marc Forster in impressive 3-D, stands on its own as a powerful vision of planetary chaos.
A relentless horror thriller that serves up a chilling vision of a planet in the throes of apocalypse ...
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| Original Score: 3/4
A letdown with a strange mixture of epic apocalyptic material and generic zombie stuff.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The choreography is thought out, and the use of 3-D is at least good enough that I embarrassed myself, leaping in my seat to get out of the way of a zombie that was falling on me.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A smart, entertaining zombie flick that's slightly cleverer and classier than most.
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| Original Score: 3/4
World War Z is still as smart, shifty and scary as a starving zombie ready to chow down on you, baby, you.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The whole movie seems in many ways like a fortunate accident. But there's no doubting the deliberate wisdom of making a star of Pitt's talent and stature the lead.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Forster's action scenes are fairly effective, if necessarily far-fetched, and his bouncy, race-track zombies are an interesting hybrid.
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| Original Score: B-
[It] has a fragmentary feel, with its novel multipart style eventually turning a bit jarring.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The surprise of the absorbing, frightening "World War Z" is that what sounds ridiculous on paper turns out be a gripper on the screen.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Essentially, it boils down to familiar fare: a well-paced, entertaining, conventional action thriller where a reluctant hero saves the day.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Pretty much what you'd want in a summer blockbuster: scary but not-too-gross zombies, a journey to exotic locales, a few excellent action scenes, and did we mention Pitt?
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| Original Score: 3/4
[It] may be the most entertaining and accomplished zombie thriller since George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead ...
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| Original Score: A-
Fast, furious and ferocious, "World War Z" proves there's plenty of bite left in zombie cinema.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Whatever caused all the production angst on this film I don't know, but you never get the feeling that Forster loses control of the images, and "World War Z" contains several of the most effective big-canvas action sequences in recent history.
Even as big-budget blockbusters go, this is a hard movie to connect with.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The stakes are high and the excitement's there and the results ... are messy but fairly entertaining.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Other than the CGI eye candy, which is intense, there is little in the way of layers and complexity to this portrait of pandemonium.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
[It] has a relatively plausible perspective on mass catastrophe. It deserves comparisons to Steven Soderbergh's brainy "Contagion."
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| Original Score: 3/4
Robustly mounted, magnificently photographed and bone-crunchingly terrifying, World War Z towers above every other alleged summer blockbuster. It's the real deal.
It's just a jumped-up midnight movie that thinks "stuff jumping out at you and making loud noises" equals horror and "perfect human being impervious to everything" equals hero.
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| Original Score: 2/4
What's missing is a sense of loss - the horror and grief that should be etched on the faces of the living.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The movie essentially becomes little more than cool set pieces ... jammed together and interspersed with underdeveloped family-strife scenes.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Here's the oddest element in this tale of Hollywood fine-tuning run rampant: the movie is pretty good -- the summer's most urgent, highest-I.Q. action picture.
It's an anemic actioner that fosters excitement like dead limbs as it lumbers toward a conclusion.
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| Original Score: 1/5
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.
Forster moves the action forward deftly scene by scene, yet the movie ends up feeling sprawling and empty, a "zombies invaded the world and all I got was a lousy T-shirt" enterprise.
As I understand it, fidelity to Max Brooks' novel has been scant at best, but neither that nor countless post-production woes prevent Paramount's adaptation from serving as an efficient and effectively exciting globe-spanning zombie thriller.
This is a surprisingly smart, gripping and imaginative addition to the zombie-movie canon.
Brad Pitt delivers a capable performance in an immersive apocalyptic spectacle about a global zombie uprising.
