World War Z TV Spot Serves Up More Of The Same

By Brent McKnight | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

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.

Based on Max Brooks’ best-selling novel, World War Z follows a U.N. worker, Gerry Lane (Pitt), as he hops around the world, looking for the cause of the worldwide pandemic of zombies, and, more importantly, trying to find a solution. This approach is a change from the book, which takes place after the zombie wars and is framed as a series of survivor’s tales.

The reasons for the alterations are pretty obvious. In book form, World War Z is more like a collection of linked short stories. There is no central protagonist—the journalist who compiles the stories rarely if ever appears in the foreground—and though the sections are thematically linked, there is no narrative through line. Reading it, the novel feels unfilmable.

For good or ill, World War Z swarms into theaters on June 21st in 3D, and also stars Mireille Enos and Matthew Fox.

What do you think? Are you looking forward to this? Have the recent trailers and posters convinced you, or are you still skeptical?