RensDad666’s review published on Letterboxd:
A majority of my late teen years were spent thinking people in movies like High Fidelity and SLC Punk! were peak cool —which in turn has had somewhat of an adverse effect on my adult life and ability to make new friends. I’ve had to undo as much programming as possible when it comes to disliking things simply because they don’t hit my preferred tastes, or that a large group of people find enjoyment in it. And on that note, I’ve been a pretty avid hater of PG-13 horror, from my perceptions of it being cheap, jump-scare laden drivel based off of a few entries into said category. In zombie cinema however, it allows us some gigantic visual moments, while also leaving the viewer left to decipher what may have occurred as opposed to explicit gore and violence. That lack of visual information can be an even more disturbing prospect if pulled off, which is mostly done in World War Z. I’d put off Mark Forster’s 2013 “Zombie Epic” in my 20’s simply because of the PG-13 tag. But, as I’ve begun to admire and appreciate big budget horror fare for the massive set pieces, and grand scale alone, World War Z largely worked for me in its efforts.
From the jump, World War Z builds an expansively comprehensive world, while letting us as a viewer craft a level of familiarity and comfort with Brad Pitt and our central family of characters. What a whirlwind opening, chock full of beautifully blocked, framed, and shot with an artful sensibility that could easily be lost in a big budget action-horror flick. And my god, the single highlight of World War Z has to be those large scale, mass of zombie “castell” scenes. With a further visual vantage point, those sequences hold just as much weight as I remember seeing in previews 13 years back, and still look phenomenal. On the other side of the coin, the gratuitous use of CG for ECU moments really pulled me out of its world, and had me limboing between being engrossed in its narrative, and participating in a “fam friendly” Hollywood spectacle. Quite the bit of tonal whiplash.
All in all, I hope we get more grand scale horror in the coming years, because lord there is some fun to be had.
🧟♂️🧟♀️🚁🩸🌇🌉🌁✈️
