Perhaps the most expensive remake of Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) anyone could ask for, Marc Forster’s big-budget zombie flick had a troubled production, but overcame it to be a major box office hit this year, catching the crest of the wave for pop culture’s current delight in all things involving the walking dead. Max Brooks’ source novel was a pastiche of historical eyewitness narratives, of the type writers like Studs Terkel and Michael Herr compiled about real epochs, a literary equivalent of the predilection for mockumentaries and found-footage movies that have been so popular in the past 15 years. Such a gonzo creation is here transmuted into a much more familiar creature: a flashy thriller where a lone hero, played inevitably by producer Brad Pitt, must jet around the world trying to save it. The template here is less that of George A. Romero’s impudently bloody fables than the disaster movie, with Pitt filling in for previous all-American, all-man savants of the kind Richard Carlson and Kenneth Tobey used to play in ‘50s B-movies. Except that there’s a recurring, glibly employed subtext about the necessity for internationalism, via Pitt’s UN-employed character, over nationalist separatism. Opening with a montage of news reports that invoke terrorism, pandemics, global warming, and other contemporary angsts for entirely specious relevance, Forster, who has been since Monster’s Ball (2001) the consummate bullshit auteur, directs with his customary flashy insubstantiality, and resolutely fails to bring any artistic depth or seriousness to the project.
Pitt is Gerry Lane, presented as an appealing long-haired alterna-dad who’s given up investigating war crimes for the UN after suffering on-the-job burnout, qualities that are given exactly zero minutes to impact upon his swashbuckling embodiment of all the stoic paterfamilias virtues. He and wife Karin (Mireille Enos) and his two daughters are caught in the middle of an outbreak of zombie-related chaos in downtown Philadelphia, and is forced to get Panic in the Year Zero on everyone’s ass. Except the problems of survivalist ethics, the usual subject of zombie films, are downplayed in favour of a Contagion-esque patient zero hunt, as Gerry is called by his former boss, the UN Deputy General Secretary, Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena), and sent flying off to various exotic hot spots before finishing up in rural Cardiff – hi, we’re in Cardiff, you can hear Wayne and Garth saying – in search of the source of the outbreak. Eventually, he realises that’s less important than the mysteriously ignored individuals the zombies seem to bypass in the midst of mass slaughters. Characterisation is practically nil, as the film begins with a fairly regulation Spielbergian save-the-family narrative, but Gerry is forced to soon leave wife and children to the not so tender mercies of their military protectors, who speedily eject anyone not immediately useful from shipboard safety. Gerry accompanies a nerdy, monster-bait scientist, Fassbach (Elyes Gabel) to South Korea, to investigate one early case on an American base, and then to Jerusalem, to find out why the Israelis seemed prescient enough to counter the zombie apocalypse, having built a really big wall (the second jab at the security barrier in this year’s major movies, along with Pacific Rim).
The film’s first forty-five minutes essentially compress the business of most zombie apocalypse films into a bite-sized morsel, as Gerry and family dash and dart to escape public calamity and hole up somewhere long enough to be rescued by Gerry’s UN contacts. The film noticeably keeps undercutting most opportunities for the kind of emotionally brutal development that Romero is so good at: whilst chaos eats away at society, the narrative’s basic assumptions, that the pretty family will be saved and Gerry is a real good guy, are never shaken up. One good sequence sees Gerry, worrying he’s infected, stationing himself on the edge of a tall building, ready to throw himself off if he starts turning, existential fear and pivotal decisions visualised in one neat composed shot at the edge of personal oblivion. But given that Forster seems constitutionally unable to hold a shot for longer than five seconds, the effect is lost. The big Hollywood production values do pay off in two fairly strong action set-pieces, one in which Jerusalem is overrun, and a second in which the epidemic spreads on an airliner. Memorable shots of the zombies piling up rapidly like a wave of diseased flesh against the Jerusalem wall and spilling over, the harum-scarum action as the confined space of the plane becomes a flying charnel house, culminating in a breached hull with zombies and people indiscriminately sucked out into the void, do give the film real moments of muscular force.
But these sequences point to the overall misconception driving the project, which is fatally under the spell of the blockbuster action flick rather than this subgenre’s roots in subversive parable and physical anxiety. The zombies are plasticised, homogenised super-killers, super-fast and mobile in the mode of Zack Snyder’s and Danny Boyle’s, rather than sepulchral stumblers, and yet this kind of zombie always strikes me as ridiculous: so, being a hunk of reanimate flesh means you can leap like a locust and outrun a cheetah? Zombies here are interchangeable with aliens or any other fill-in-the-blank monstrous threat. Pitt’s character readily reveals himself as an omnicompetent superman – surely a fantasy for house husbands everywhere – as he’s whisked from locale to locale in the search for the source of the zombie epidemic in a sort of geopolitically convenient version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? with zombies. Forster’s attempts to construct pretentious linkages between what he’s showing on screen and various real-world ideas are undercut by the breathless pace and by Forster’s own shallow realism, boiling the ruthless political reflections and social breakdown studies of Romero’s films down to cute homilies: fear not the long-haired pharmacy raider and trust in the hospitality of the neighbourhood Latinos. At least in Birdemic there actually was a link between James Nguyen’s environmental concerns and his dramatic metaphor for it: the birds were attacking because of global warming. Here, you can all but hear Forster and credited screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, and Damon Lindelof congratulating themselves on constructing a clever pop parallel, when in fact all they’ve done is turn a volatile variety of genre into an extended video game. Dodge the shopping mall raiders! Negotiate the apartment block labyrinth! Outrun the zombie invasion of the Holy Land! Survive the plane crash!
Although interesting actors in interesting roles are introduced, particularly Daniella Kertesz as a taciturn Israeli soldier who only calls herself Segen (Lieutenant), and Peter Capaldi as one of the hapless scientists in a WHO facility in Cardiff, no-one’s allowed to develop substance, except tangentially. A cameo by David Morse as a teeth-pulling, rogue CIA agent offering up grim facts and confirmation that all normality is about to become desolated, gives the film a brief but welcome shot of incantatory strangeness as the equivalent of a wilderness preacher speaking words of dread and awe. The whole affair is scarcely bloodier than this year’s teen-romance variation on the theme, Warm Bodies (which was actually the better, more coherent film), signalling that the price zombies are paying for their annexation by the mainstream is loss of their carnal ferocity: soon they’ll be playing in romantic melodramas of forbidden love, too. Oh, wait… Anyway, the film’s most striking scene is its one, intimately violent moment, as Gerry slices off Segen’s hand after she’s bitten, saving her from zombification but later torturing her less with physical pain than awareness she’s now almost useless. The finale spirals into intelligence-insulting foolishness as Gerry, Segen, and a third klutz try to sneak their way through a zombie-crowded facility. They’re aware that noise attracts the zombies, but apparently this collective of really clever people are incapable of creating some kind of diversion. But don’t worry: the world is saved, and we can all still drink Pepsi.
A wasted opportunity.
