Movie review: World War Z: Brad Pitt vs. the zombies

There’s plenty of love going around for the zombie genre.

Notoriety for those walking corpses that eat human flesh arguably began when George A. Romero made his seminal black and white horror classic “Night of the Living Dead.” The film brought a whole new meaning to terror to movie audiences around the world, and spawned a cult following around the twin tentpoles of zombie flicks: survival horror and social commentary.

Comic book writer Robert Kirkman would meet similar success with his zombie apocalypse series “The Walking Dead,” which has been adapted by AMC into a successful television series that depicts a band of survivors desperately searching for a safe haven from the dead.

Echoing that success is "World War Z," author Max Brooks' follow-up to his 2003 work, "The Zombie Survival Guide."

While "World War Z" the book is a compilation of interviews and accounts regarding the worldwide zombie outbreak, the film version is an entirely different creature that focuses on Pitt as former United Nations investigator Gerry Lane. An everyman who’s sharp and very protective of his family, Gerry's calm new life is thrust back into chaos when the living dead come out of nowhere and cripple society to the brink of collapse.

Managing to secure his family to safety, Gerry is soon called into service to determine the source of the outbreak and fight not only for his family’s future, but for the fate of humanity as well.

Like many summer blockbuster films of the season, "World War Z" will appeal to those looking for action, suspense, and a big name like Pitt attached as its lead. There’s plenty of stuff here that will see the Academy Award nominee and star bounce back and forth as he travels to different locations around the globe to find the origins of the zombie epidemic and figure out a way to stop it.

Action-wise, it doesn’t miss a beat and helps establish the desperation needed to carry this movie from start to finish.

Plot-wise, it feels unrealistic and in many ways has a kinship with Michael Bay’s "Transformer" movies: there’s so much shock, chaos and explosions that sometimes it’s hard to tell where to focus while watching.

The zombies in particular are running generic drones that swarm and overwhelm the populace. The movie sometimes goes overboard with the ghouls, but it works for the most part.

Sharing much in common with Danny Boyle’s "28 Days Later" and the 2004 "Dawn of the Dead" remake film directed by Zack Snyder ("Man of Steel"), World War Z's ghouls are fast, powerful and ravage the living quickly, with the infection spreading with alarming ease.

Old-school fans may miss the rotting B-movie shamblers popularized in the Romero films and the "Walking Dead" franchise, but there's a nod here and there throughout the movie, especially when Gerry faces the dead in confined spaces.