World War Z Trailer Has Zombies…Lots And Lots Of Zombies

I guess now we know whether they're fast zombies or slow zombies.

By David Wharton | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

I had pretty much relegated World War Z, the adaptation of the bestselling book by Max Brooks, to the same category as Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote: a promising project that seems cursed at every turn, and which would probably never actually make it to screen. But lo and behold, a first trailer! And even more unlikely: it actually looks kind of badass. Here’s Brad Pitt having a really, really bad day.

After all the movies and shows and books and games and comics about zombies over the years, it’s hard to find a new way to tell a zombie story, and it’s rare to see a new spin on the genre that does more than just recycle what came before. AMC’s The Walking Dead pulls it off, at least on their best days. While it’s impossible to tell whether World War Z will work as a whole, this trailer makes it clear that the film is trying to stand out in one particular way: volume.

While much of the trailer is variations on apocalyptic visions we’ve seen a thousand times before, it does have several money shots that rely on the sheer, unstoppable force of a horde – nay, a legion – of hungry undead. We’ve seen other zombie outings hint at how outnumbered our human survivors inevitably are, but this trailer has several jaw-dropping visuals that really sell that impossible sense of scale. The bus cartwheeling down the street in front of a countless swarm of zombies. Thousands of the undead scaling over each other to reach the top of a wall. These moments are genuinely badass, and if the rest of the movie can live up to those moments, World War Z might just make us forget about its troubled production after all.

You can also watch the trailer in HD over at Apple.