Salem Reviews A Movie, and has rather Strong Feels.

                                                                            I will remain calm.

                                          I will remain calm.

     Some people think the zombie fad is over. That it's been played out. That zombies, as a 'thing,' are over and done with. I am most fervently not one of these people. I'm looking forward to the return of The Walking Dead (and have a figure of Andrea on the shelf over my desk - Team Andrea!) and Left 4 Dead 2 is still one of my all-time favorite games. I am shamed to admit that I enjoyed the Resident Evil films, and have played RE6 twice since buying it in June. Something about the lonely desolation of a post-zombie-apocalypse world appeals to me, deranged loner that I am.

     I have a copy of The Zombie Survival Handbook. It's well-thumbed, and when I still smoked regular cigarettes, I'd pop outside, read a random article in it whilst smoking, and repeat every hour or so. I've probably read that book cover to cover three or four times. I don't read as often as I used to, so when I broke down and bought a copy of World War Z, that was kind of a big deal for me. I liked that Max Brooks decided to take a strictly documentary approach to the ZedApoc, and that he was using slow, classic zombies instead of rage-zombies. The Battle of Yonkers and the International Space Station bits really captured my imagination, and just the thought of recovery and rebuilding a world after something that catastrophic...

                                                      I will remain calm. Will I, fuck.

     I saw the trailer for World War Z and despaired. It looked like a generic zombie flick, and it had Brad Pitt  in it. I decided to pass. Recently, I got a chance to see the film. I was... less than impressed.

     Gone are the slow shamblers that, if you were smart, you could fight. In their place were rabid rage-beasts that went from human to physics defying tidal waves of flesh in 13 seconds. I had resolved to remain calm regarding this, but as I watched the movie, I just got more and more mad. Irrationaly mad. Angry. I wanted to grab this film by its crashed airplanes and punch it in its big stupid plot-convenience gob.

Salem is less than pleased with the outcome of this film.

     What we have at this point is, quite literally, a zombie movie. Not a movie about zombies, but a stupid fucking movie that IS a zombie. It lurches unsteadily from set piece to set piece, with lifeless characters and rotting cliches, stretching your suspension of disbelief to the snapping point at the half-hour mark and staggering away with its throat between its smelly, decaying teeth. I went, scene to scene, from being actively frustrated by this movie to sheer boredom.

     The last few minutes of the film, and only the last few minutes of the film are worthy of the name "World War Z," as it sets up a post-ZedApoc world that, paradoxically, looks like it could be a more interesting sequel than the original film was. Being somewhat of a fan of the zombie genre, I know this probably affects me more than it should. I know a lot of people probably liked this movie. I can't explain quite why I'm so angry at it, though. All I know is that I now want a Resident Evil movie marathon to clean my palette of this.. spoiled meat.