The WWZ movie is, shockingly, not terrible, and I’d even go so far as to call it good. It bears little resemblance to the book by this point, but the book isn’t perfect. So while it’s dropped some of the good things, it’s also dropped plenty of the bad. The zombies are runners (Olympic runners at that) but they follow simple, consistent rules of behavior that can believably result in some of the more complex things we see from them, the people act like people and get lots of little characterization moments, plot points that are raised are followed up on, and the resolution is foreshadowed repeatedly throughout movie. You really wouldn’t know that it’s been rewritten a dozen or two times. Also, people are decent and work together, which is always nice to see.

It really isn’t gory either – that was probably a poor decision that angered many, but it’s also the only reason I could watch it in the theater in the first place, so I don’t mind. The couple minor jump scares it has were more than enough to terrorize me.

It opens with a lot of news of varying importance and random shots of animals that gradually get more sinister and show wolves and ants tearing apart their prey. I don’t think this really has much to do with anything plotwise, but it does set the tone fine.

For a movie that’s been through such long development hell, it’s amazingly coherent even about minor things. We learn early on that one of the main character’s daughters has asthma, and indeed, this comes into play for the next few scenes.

Sadly, the zombies themselves are straight rage zombies, even doing flying leaps onto their prey. People turn within seconds of being bit – so, while this does answer the question of why it’s so hard to stop the spread once it gets going, it does make the claims this got here on planes or otherwise functions like any communicable disease in its spread ridiculous. Much time is spent on trying to figure out what the point of origin is, and supposedly it’s impossible because there are cases everywhere, but it sure seems more like it should have spread like a wildfire from a single distinct point. No one bit gets more than a few feet before turning themselves.

There’s almost an explanation for this, so perhaps there was originally and it was lost in the cuts – people turn within seconds, but we get some exposition from a CIA guy who saw the outbreak hitting earlier, and he says he’s seen it take ten minutes. This otherwise doesn’t come into play in the movie, so my best guess is it was supposed to be explaining the disease has sped up from its initial symptoms- thus also explaining claims that plane travel was a major factor in spreading it.

Now, normally, virulent diseases evolve to be less deadly and have a longer incubation period, because killing everyone prevents your spread. But here, killing the host and triggering the symptoms are how it spreads, so the only evolutionary pressure is on doing that faster. The first people might have taken hours or days to turn, but by the time there’s a zombie wave coursing through America’s cities, it’s almost instant. So this would actually make perfect sense.

But regardless, it does mean they’re not really zombies but more like dumb, low-power vampires. On the brighter side, all the zombie science but how the zombies got so far despite turning so fast hung together nicely. There isn’t much emphasis on headshots and we see the bodies continue to be twitchy and creepy afterward, they just lose the ability to target, which makes a lot more sense than the idea a bullet to the brain scientifically cures undeath. And there’s none of the extra nonsense the books dragged in about being immune to water pressure and toxic to all life on the planet.

It’s definitely pretty terrifying to imagine facing – when I saw the trailers alone I observed that if we’ve dealing with undead army ant monkey zombies, humanity is pretty fucked. But it really doesn’t use anything about zombies to do it – there’s no creeping inevitability, and although we’re told they’re dead, everything happens too fast for it to really matter if they’re actually dead or just rabid.

There are a lot of cool distance shots of the zombies attacking crowds, but every last one of them is too brief – instead of one sustained shot, they show a dozen, making it hard to make sense of what’s going on beyond that people are moving. The zombies and the humans running from them do move differently, but it’s not a big enough difference to be obvious in most of the quick shots. It’s usually a struggle to distinguish between the two quickly even when they’re at street level.

A lot of this movie feels like a more modern Dawn of the Dead (ignoring the actual more modern Dawn of the Dead, which I didn’t see and can’t compare to) but without quite getting the point. Dawn of the Dead opens at a news station and shows relevant clips with enough time to actually digest what you’re seeing. You get an amazing lot of information through this without it feeling forced. Dawn of the Dead also involves lots of pans over the shambling dead, but it moves slowly enough you can actually make sense of what you’re seeing. If WWZ involved a helicopter flying by a mall, the scene would last at best just long enough for us to see that there were people in the parking lot before moving on. In some of the scenes I barely had time to even pick out the dots on the ground.

Plotwise, though, I was really impressed. It isn’t at all the story of WWZ, but it goes out of its way to debunk some of WWZ’s stupidity and the general stupid zombie myths, so thumbs up for that. It’s mentioned that the dead can’t get sick with viruses because diseases use living cells. Crowbars are a terrible weapon and using one almost gets the guy killed. The military guys acknowledge headshots aren’t easy, and that it’s more important to hit them and bring them down for a bit than aim for the head and miss, and also point out that a kneecapped zombie is still a zombie that’s not biting you so who cares if it’s not properly dead. They use barbed wire to entangle the zombies despite that obviously not doing much to actually kill them. And soldiers respond to the initial zombie outbreak in their bunker by burning them all and stopping the infection in its tracks. Bikes are used for transportation, being quiet, maneuverable, and much faster than running, something you practically never see people considering.

One of the only bits that they actually kept straight from the book was the Israel section’s conversation, sadly, complete with the bit about people not believing stuff until it happens. So there’s still sitting through a guy assuring us that seriously, Israel will throw money and people at anything, no matter how dumb, and that’s why they built the wall. It’s a very long scene when all we needed to hear was “Israel is more paranoid than you and we got lucky this time!” Couldn’t you have spent this time on having the city views last long enough I could actually see what’s happening?

More interestingly, this time, Israel falls. They’re letting in people and as the refugees celebrate their safety, the sound grows until the zombies turn their attention to the walls and begin to swarm. It’s really cool, because it’s not like they’re making a deliberate zombie ladder, they’re just all climbing over each other with the end result being a tower. Emergent behavior is awesome and I wish more monster movies focused on that. Anyway, while they do their best to knock the zombies down, they’re not fast enough, and while a couple regular zombies making their way in wouldn’t be an issue, rage zombies are pretty much unstoppable and lead to a river of snarling bodies flowing after the fleeing characters.

For something with so much meddling, the resolution makes perfect sense. The first zombie attack we see, the zombie barely draws blood before running off to its next victim. Then throughout the movie, we see occasional people ignored by the zombies. The movie fumbles the execution a bit – it claims the zombies avoid anyone terminally ill because a virus that can rewrite your body in seconds to move around while dead clearly can’t get anything out of someone who’s going to die next month – but it answers the crucial question of why “scientific” zombies don’t attack each other, and even provides a mechanism for why people in this are rarely injured beyond a quick bite. The zombies avoid attacking the already infected, so infect yourself with something else nasty and they’ll ignore you as well. And you even get a genre clue in that when he cuts off a soldier’s hand in the hopes of preventing the infection, it works – and movie insistence on unstoppable transmission tends to go with similar insistence it’s impossible to camouflage yourself ever. For all things are stacked against them (leaping rage zombies and all), the movie rewards ingenuity rather than punishing people for not just giving up and dying like so much horror stuff does. And he actually gets to the pathogens needed to try out the theory by using all the knowledge they already have about zombies to stealth his way through. Then the ending shows them dropping vials of whatever disease they settled on for trapped people, allowing people to walk their way through the zombies and get to safety. Meanwhile, the soldiers infect themselves and then go slaughter the undead.

The one weirdness that it shared with the book is that no one had cellphones. I think couple may have shown up very early on and that’s it for them. The main character gets a military one to call his wife, everyone else has nothing. Part of this may be the writers thinking only Americans have cellphones, but the scientists didn’t seem to have any either.

I really liked the people in this. WWZ had a lot of assholes, and the apocalyptic genre at large usually has other people be at least half the problem and often all of it. During the pre-zombie traffic jam, everyone is generally friendly, and it’s that which makes the police motorcycles racing by without explanation stand out. And it keeps up from there. All the minor people we run across through the movie seem like actual people, all with lives of their own. And the many soldiers who appear are also all good people who don’t plan to kill the rest of us to cover their escape. Thanks, soldiers! That’s all I want. In fact, I’m pretty sure no one betrayed other people to zombies in the entire movie. There was only one outburst of human on human violence at all, during the store section, and it was a strange exception.

Where it screwed this up, funnily enough, was with the major characters. It suffered in making the main character The Main Character Upon Which All Revolves. He’s actually pretty okay himself – I really liked his practical handling of himself, with the taping of stuff to his forearm so that a zombie taking a bite won’t turn him. And yet, did any of his family get this? No. His family is just there to be helpless. After they get to safety, there’s this whole subplot about him bargaining to keep them on the ship despite not being essential personale, a privilege absolutely no one else gets, and this isn’t cruelty, it’s that the ship has too many people on it to support. Yet it’s portrayed as cruel blackmail because when they initially ask him politely to help them SAVE THE HUMAN RACE he’s all nah I wanna chill with my family doing nothing while everyone else dies. And this when they’ve got some poor kid with them who lost his whole family! You’d think that’d give you some perspective about your stupid problems. When he goes missing, we’re supposed to view it as some horrible tragedy and betrayal that they’re kicked off and forced into a mere land safe zone (where, incidentally, they are totally safe for the rest of the movie, despite his bitching). Before they get kicked off, the only things the wife does is tell him not to go, laze around emoing about her missing husband, then finally getting people killed by trying to call him while the group’s trying to sneak past zombies. As she is not an intelligent human being but some sort of pet the main character keeps, when he can call again he just reassures her everything’s fine and he’s still alive, as one would, say, a dog. (Admittedly, he deserves some of the blame for keeping the phone on at all when he’s only ever supposed to use it to call out, especially when later the batteries die on him. Maybe you should have just turned it off until you were ready to call. But then, he never seems to feel any concern over the people who die trying to get him from one place to another. That’s not action movie-y, I guess.)

The movie’s treatment of race overall felt well meaning but not particularly great – lots of different people in the crowd shots, Immigrant Family being great, selfless people regardless of their inability to speak English, but then the parents are dead and the little kid of Friendly Immigrant Family had his suffering totally glossed over. When the main character has to leave his family, he tells the kid, who watched his own family attack and had to escape alone to the rooftop while chased by zombies including his former parents, to watch out for his girls while he’s gone as they suffer the terrible fate of not having their dad with them right at this exact moment. The kid is ridiculously stoic, which is stands out badly given the two girls are portrayed as actual kids with issues who spend their half of the movie being panicking trouble for their parents. And I really, really do not know who thought it was best to make the doctor zombie the virology people were studying black when we spend about five minutes watching the black doctor zombie be a snarling subhuman animal in its cage.

(Also, it annoys me that the scientist guy died such a stupid death – I get why they wanted him to die early, but the death is so stupid it seems like it’s a judgement on his whole character. The movie otherwise didn’t seem particularly anti-intellectual, though, and the second batch of scientists we run into are handling themselves well despite half the building having zombified. I’m not sure if this might be a sign of some other direction it meant to go in – the guy’s ramble about how nature will hide a weakness by making it look like a strength all sounds very dramatic, but doesn’t seem to fit the eventual end, unless the idea is that the virus’ strength (reanimating the dead) is actually a weakness of not being able to work with anyone close to death…except there is really no reason to think the virus can’t actually infect those close to death, and no one ever makes a big deal about the zombies not attacking each other, which would make sense as a weakness hidden as a strength.)

But overall, I thought it was a good movie.

Of course, there wasn’t any of the uniqueness of WWZ – not only is it taking place in the present rather than a retrospective, but while there’s a contrived plot to try to get him to move between locations, even then there’s not time for much and although there’s interviewing, there’s just a single lone flashback and it’s pretty crappy, especially when we’re hearing about how North Korea’s solution this time was to tear out everyone’s teeth. I’d have liked to actually see how things went down there. The zombies have nothing to do with how WWZ zombies work. Also, they’ve meticulously cut out the political stuff, especially all mention that China might have been involved, down to speculating it was the German organ trade that spread it around. I’m not sure why they didn’t just make a zombie movie of their own without bothering to buy the rights to WWZ. The only real similarities are that Israel builds a wall in both.