MOVIE COMMENTARY: World War Z

I am actually looking forward to another zombie movie, this time, one that is fast and really, really the furious type. The wide success of the television hit show, The Walking Dead has made me look at fast zombies in a little more open-minded way. Indeed, I used to scorn fast zombies. If there were to be a zombie outbreak of sorts in real life, they most likely would be the slow, nimble type. In fact, rabies victims could be the closest we can have to a sort of a zombie-like phenomenon. Their fear of water, erratic movements, quirky mannerisms attest to the loss of basic neural functions commonly associated with zombies.

Unfortunately, World War Z will not be released until June 2013. The producers seem to have adopted a strategy of immersion, ensuring that the movie will gain a wider audience acceptance and popularity by a slow yet concerted effort to slowly saturate the media with its trailers. The only problem with fast zombies is that it makes them look more "thinking", in-control types, whereas the traditional movie portrayals of such creatures is one of mindless, rapacious and bloody monsters. This is pretty much au contraire to the supposed loss of cognitive functions that comes along with being infected by the "zombie virus." Yes, I guess if there were to be a real-life zombie outbreak, the culprit would most likely be a virus as they are easily transmissible, mutates very fast, and is of course difficult to eradicate. If a zombie moves fast, we have to discard the traditional paradigm of a brute and gut-driven creature, we have to construct a new worldview, a zombie that actually thinks - moving fast requires some sort of "thinking" capacity. No creature can move fast if there is no sort of a cognitive capacity, for example, to decide within a split second on which direction to move and how fast requires mental functions, however primitive.

It goes without saying that a movie with a fast zombie is a movie that somehow redefines what a zombie is all about in the first place - a creature that scares us precisely because it has lost its human capacity for discretion, control, thinking and coordination. I am afraid that what World War Z is presenting is not really a zombie, but something else in-between.

But then again, its just a movie. And movies are supposed to bring us, even for a fleeting time, into the world of fantasy and dream - in this case, a fantasy outside of the fantasy we have been used to seeing, at least where the concept of zombies are concerned. I just hope that the movie presents an entertaining, visually stimulating and cinematographically decent piece of work.