'World War Z' triumphs zombie trend

Zombies are back from the dead.

I’m not exactly sure as to what movie, television show or book brought them back, but they’re back. In the past decade, we’ve seen them in every form: comedy, action, horror, romance, drama; the list goes on and on. We’ve also seen every type of zombie: fast, slow, super strong, weak, blah blah blah.

So what makes Marc Forster’s “World War Z,” based on Max Brooks 2006 novel of the same name, so unique?

Well, nothing. It’s just zombie-apocalypse refined to an unparalleled degree.

“World War Z” takes us through a post-apocalyptic world overrun by zombies seen from the eyes of an ex-United Nations investigator, played by Brad Pitt, during his search all over the hellish new world to find the cure for the disease claiming the planet.

From the very get-go, “World War Z” moves at such a brisk and dizzying speed that keeping up is fun, edge-of-your-seat cinema. Save for a slightly disappointingly slow finale, it’s well-paced — it does give us needed breathers, but for the most part, the movie keeps chugging from city to city, from one terrifying zombie onslaught to the next. Just as soon as we think we’re in the clear, that’s when the mania starts again. Relentless.

Visually, “World War Z” is stunning. Not many films’ special effects truly enhance them to an insane degree, but the effects featured in “World War Z” are incredible. From the zombies themselves to the speed of the zombies as they tumble over another in massive hordes to the veritable ocean of zombies climbing vertically on walls, climbing on top of one another to reach the top — it’s all breathtaking. It brings out the life in a very hard-to-imagine world, and elevates the danger to a staggering new height. Aesthetically, “World War Z” is simply on a different plane than its competitors.

Throughout the movie, there would be moments where my heart felt like it was about to pound out of my chest, where my breath would be taken away and where the sheer horror on the screen would feel so real that I almost felt like I was there.

And in that lies the film’s almost fatal flaw. “World War Z” was so intent on making such an outstanding zombie movie that it forgot that, at its core, it was the story of humans. It found difficulty in bringing its characters to life. There was a lack of soul, no flavor and nothing that bridged the final connection between audience and screen. The acting and dialogue felt sort of stale, which, granted, can be slightly more forgivable in movies like this, but still lacking nonetheless. A much smaller complaint is the film’s compromise to nail that ubiquitously friendly PG-13 rating. For what it’s worth, the film could have brought itself to an even higher plane if it made the violence more realistic. The gore could have been way more in-your-face, and with that, heightened the urgency of the situation even more. It definitely would have been better aiming for an R rating.

At the end of the day, “World War Z” is an outstanding zombie movie, a fun summer blockbuster and another solid addition to the line of strangely incredibly high-quality zombie art that has been released recently.

Keep the zombie trend going, Hollywood. We don’t mind.