In recent memory, it’s hard to think of a movie getting worse press than World War Z, and it’s still ways away from being out in theaters, with a current release date of June 21, 2013.
As we’ve reported previously on TG, the film has been plagued with major reshoots, shifting release dates, and new writers being brought in at the eleventh hour trying to save the script, with the budget climbing up to a reported $170 million.
The press has repeatedly categorized the World War Z shoot as a nightmare, but what does that matter if the movie turns out great? Well, nothing, because nobody’s going to care how difficult the shoot was, if it delivers on the big screen.
While many had predicted that the whole zombie thing would be played out by now, the undead are still going strong, especially with the ratings powerhouse of The Walking Dead. Not to mention the novel World War Z is still on the best-seller lists after all this time. So this week an advance teaser poster for World War Z surfaced, which meant a teaser trailer wasn’t far behind.
Sure enough, the trailer is now out in the world, and to me it definitely has its strengths and weaknesses. It reminds me a lot of Independence Day mixed with Inception in terms of action, and there’s definitely some well-shot footage in it. At the same time, I’m not so sure about the huge piles of zombies that end up crawling over each other, a touch clearly ripped off from Inception, and it also looks like they run in this one, which is becoming a pretty tired cliché these days. (Whatever happened to the days when zombies really lurched and didn’t need to run to kill anybody?)
Having seen the trailer weeks ago, Cinema Blend wrote, “World War Z seems to have the scale of a massive disaster film, with [Brad] Pitt’s character somehow in the center of the resistance. As much as fans of the book might now welcome that change, a global-scale zombie movie sounds like the exact right way to fresh up the genre at this point.”
Another writer from Blend wrote that the trailer is so seemingly different from the novel, “you begin to wonder why they used the title at all…Honestly, it looks like any other zombie movie you’ve seen – only with more CGI hordes and less individual members of the walking dead.”
Whether all the trouble and behind the scenes headaches were worth it, we’ll find out next year when World War Z is finally upon us June 21, 2013.
