While there’s a stream of new Netflix movies to choose from every month, this time I found myself going back to my favorite creature feature World War Z after it became available on the best streaming service. Despite watching the blockbuster hit at least three times before, World War Z still manages to get my heart pounding at every nail-biting twist and turn as the zombies unleash a ferocious attack across the globe.
So, you can understand my surprise when I discovered that the highest-grossing zombie movie of all time has a rather disappointing Rotten Tomatoes score of 67%, which also means that it doesn’t meet our criteria to earn a place on the best Netflix movies list.
When World War Z was released in 2013, it became a commercial success, earning over $540 million at the box office and was even developed into one of the best zombie video games. World War Z was praised for reviving the zombie sub-genre that had gone quiet for decades following the likes of 28 Days Later and the king of zombie movies Dawn of the Dead. Variety agreed with this point as they wrote in their review: “Brad Pitt’s much-maligned World War Z emerges as a surprisingly smart, gripping and imaginative addition to the zombie movie canon.”
However, with good reviews always come the bad – and in this case, there was a lot of criticism surrounding the film as it didn’t remain faithful to the source material. While this may be very important for some viewers, the suspenseful action sequences and Pitt’s performance as a realistic hero armed with the desire to save his family rather than the world, makes this one of the best horror movies in my opinion.
Why World War Z is worth the watch
Based on Max Brooks’ novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, World War Z stars Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator who goes on a deadly mission across the world to stop a zombie outbreak that is destroying humanity.
World War Z was met with backlash as it strayed from what Brooks had envisioned in his book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. In the novel, the undead adhere to the more ‘traditional’ slow-moving zombies and are relentless in spreading the pathogen through biting or scratching living humans. Meanwhile, in the film adaptation, the zombies are animalistic fast zombies who run and lunge at their targets. Their sole focus is to spread the infection by biting their victim, but they also quickly lose interest once they’ve attacked someone and immediately go after another uninfected person.
It’s possible that World War Z fell victim to the now-popular concept of having fast-moving zombies because it faced many production changes and reshoots as they thought it was too political and complex when they tried to match it to the source material, according to Inverse.
Fans of the book were disappointed to hear this, but I think they did a good job in translating the book’s core principles into an immersive cinematic spectacle, which is that the world is completely unprepared to deal with global disasters and one another.
The non-stop action and the fact that it throws you immediately into zombie mayhem is what I love about World War Z, so I was dejected to hear that a sequel had been scrapped due to supposed budget issues and dissolved any hopes of a promising new zombie franchise. But while I yearn for a sequel to continue the story, Screen Rant revealed that a World War Z remake could be in the pipeline, which would be an ideal opportunity to explore the original novel’s storyline and attract fresh viewers to the same world.
