Giant Freakin Robot

“Mother nature is a serial killer.” After a long and troubled production history, World War Z is finally arriving this summer. This new look at the fast-moving zombie film showcases cast and crew interviews, including director Marc Forster. Check it out above if you haven’t already.

The first-look featurette also gives a better sense of the stakes involved in the film. It appears that there are only 87 days before humanity will be completely wiped out by fast-moving, flesh-eating zombies. World War Z certainly has some spectacular visuals, but whether it will have an engaging narrative remains to be seen.

With only two months until it’s released, World War Z will feed the frenzy of a zombie-crazed pop culture. The film’s producer and star Brad Pitt originally conceived of World War Z as somewhat of a political thriller set after the zombie apocalypse, but the heavily reported production delays re-invented the film into a more conventional zombie action film.

Director Marc Forster tells Empire that the production problems on World War Z were dramatically misreported. It was believed that World War Z had to do seven weeks of reshoots to accommodate script changes from screenwriter Drew Goddard. According to Forster, these reports were false:

No, seven weeks is not correct. We shot for about four-and-a-half. Reshooting was always normal! …Our reshoots were a little more exposed in the press because we had a different ending. We felt a different ending would serve the movie better. It’s the same if you’re buying a house and you roll out a nice Persian carpet for your living room and you realise it doesn’t really fit.”

World War Z has been getting some harsh criticisms from zombie purists who aren’t fans of the fast-moving zombies depicted in the film’s trailers, or in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake. Forster explains why the film went in this direction:

Many of us have been worried about World War Z, the Marc Forster-directed, Brad Pitt-starring zombie drama coming this summer from Paramount. There are some serious red flags. The production has been subjected to various potholes and roadblocks, including extensive reshoots and multiple writers being brought in to fix the third act.

Funny thing: recently World War Z has started to look, well, good. The recent theatrical trailer is full of tension, action, and swarming hordes of corpses. This latest TV spot features a few snippets of new footage, but it mostly falls in line with what has come before.

For good or ill, Brad Pitt’s zombie actioner World War Z is going to swarm theaters on June 21st. A new poster gives you a glimpse of the mayhem caused by a worldwide undead pandemic.

This latest one sheet shows Pitt’s character, a U.N. worker named Gerry Lane, looking down on a devastated city engulfed in flames and chaos. Though he’s supposed to be deeply affected by what he witnesses, you can’t help but ask the question: is he peeing? Because it looks a little like he’s taking a whiz. That’s no way to put out the fires, there are far too many of them, and I don’t care how big your bladder is, it isn’t that big. It doesn’t even look like he’s trying to save the world; he’s just watching it burn.