World War Z 10 Years Later (Netflix)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watch this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started. Today in the show, we are talking about World War Z. So it's ten years later World War Z. Is it came out? Yeah? So it came out exactly almost to the day, ten years ago. It's an incredible rewatch post pandemic because it's really a movie about how different nations around the world deal with an existential endemic threat, and we have seen that in real life, so it watching it is such a different experience now than it was when it actually came out. I watched it on Netflix and it's actually leaving Netflix on June thirtieth, so if you're curious to rewatch it, you have five days when this comes out, basically to watch it. Watching this movie made me think a lot about the early days of COVID because one of the best parts of the film is the initial turn from everything's normal to the whole world is upside down. In the early days of COVID, I remember reading tweets from people

1:34 in Italy and they were talking about how severe COVID was in Italy, and tweets some doctors how overwhelmed their system was, and you know, regular citizens about how much it totally affected their lives. And I remember seeing those and thinking, you know, specifically, that was the moment for me where I was like, this is definitely coming to America and it's going to be severe. And now that we're sort of, you know, we're not totally past it. I mean, COVID still is a thing that exists, but in terms of how it is affecting our lives, we kind of aren't past it. I think about this all the time, like, you know, now I go to the grocery store and you know, it's it's just it's almost like back to normal. It's like nothing it has so drastically reduced the volume of how severe this was, but it was like a defining thing of our lives for what like two years. It's almost like a dream, like it's like it's it's so strange that that happened, and the feeling of that of going to sort of headfirst into something so severe where you know, I mean, at the height COVID, I'm trying to remember in America what our death toll per day was, but I think we were topping a thousand dead per day. And then you know, coming out of it, and the sort of like whoa, you know, surreal nature of coming out of it, that's all felt. And World War Z. There's a great speech from a character that Brad Pitt Meet meets who's a virologist, and he's talking about viruses and mother Nature. It's impossible to watch that speech and not think about COVID.

3:05 One of the elements of the story that's really interesting is that Israel does a great job initially at protecting against the zombies, which in the case of COVID, and I know because I have family members who you know, wanted to travel to Israel during the pandemic, they were equally severe. They basically was like a two week quarantine. No matter what, we don't care who you are. What's the situation is you try to come to Israel's two week quarantine and kind of it's echoed in the movie where Israel initially is very effective at repelling, you know, finding a way to safeguard themselves against the zombies. You also just kind of forget. I mean, I think again, I don't know. At the time, you know, we were sort of zombies were becoming like very in vogue, and so we saw a lot of zombie stuff, and you know, I think it was easy to kind of take where we're seeing for granted, we're looking back at it. It's really good, Like it's it's so well paced. That was something that it's very noticeable to me on the rewatch. I watched it this morning at like five am, and I paused at one point and I was like, I've probably watched maybe like thirty forty five mention. No, I watched an hour.

4:12 It went by in like the blink of an eye. It's so fast paced, it's so good. I'm retroactively even less enthusiastic about Secret Invasion. Oh, not that they say, but there are elements of them that have some relation to each other. It's very well made. There's a lot in it that I was very impressed with. It's there's a moment particularly that I want to highlight. Brad Pitt is on this plane and he's kind of looking out the window, and I think the pilot is also looking out the window, and like they both see that someone has nuked something. Clearly that's what happened, and everyone kind of looks at it and it's just not discussed. And the fact that that's just thrown off as a casual detail I thought was really great. It was really effective. Great use of fast zombies. You know, I think the slow zombies. You know, it's so interesting that how many the fast zombies. I think it's just way scarier. You know, It's like the the inclusion of fast zombies. The switch to fast zombies is just a better idea. You know, I think that slow zombies there's a purity to it, right. I think purists of the zombie genre might prefer that. But once they introduced the fast zombies, as far as I was concerned, it's like going back. You gotta stick with the fast zombies.

5:23 That's what makes the movie so freaky and scary is that the zombies are like they're like almost like a living, breathing entity as a whole. That's what the sequence with the wall in Israel is so freaky. When they're climbing on top of each other and fallen off and all that. In general it has it has like five great sequences. The Philly sequence at the beginning where you go from normal to oh shit, like this is happening and it feels real. It feels like, oh man, if this happened in real life, it's probably how it happened. The sequence in New York with the roof, the Israel wall sequence, there's a great plane sequence I think for the Rector mark Forrester. Definitely his most entertaining film, and it's when you watch it, it's such a big world. The international quality of it, right, seeing all the different countries and how they handle this situation differently, and that's so interesting. There's so much to explore there, and it's hard not to watch it and think, man, what could have been? Because they had a sequel. I did a little research into it. It was ready to go completely. There's a quote somewhere on the internet from Mimura Enos and she says something the effective like, we had David Fincher, we had a great script, we had Brad Pitt, we were ready to start production, and ultimately the studio kind of pulled the plug because China does not allow zombie films, and they just didn't want to make this big, expensive movie without China as a potential market. But it's so tantalizing to think, Man, what would David Fincher have done with something like this, because he hasn't really I

6:56 looked at his filmography, he hasn't really done anything like that. It's a big, giant zombie epic. David Fincher, what would that happen? Like? I rewatched this movie and I thought a lot about The Gray Man, which you know, probably a significantly higher budget, just as much action, but totally did not engage me at all. And this movie engaged me from minute one to the end. And it's I think pretty well written. You know, the quieter moments, the character moments building, the characters who interacts with briefly, great cast, some great James Badge Dale in this movie, the actress who plays the Israeli soldier, her relationship with Brad Pitt. That's all really good. And the third act, you know, a lot of was made of this at the time that you know, they had to spend so much money to redo the whole third act, a very expensive decision.

7:46 I think it costs them like ninety million dollars or something like that. But it's great. It's a really smart decision to go small rather than keep trying to top yourself, which it would be impossible. It's such a big movie. And then even the ending, again in a post COVID kind of age, the ending is prescient because the cure is you have to infect yourself with something bad and then it makes your body like it protects you against something worse, essentially, So knowing that, I actually I literally looked up, like, how does the COVID virus work? Vaccine work? And apparently, according to the Internet, the way the COVID vaccine works not suddenly turns this into a show bad of vaccines, but the idea of the vaccine is that you get a viral vector. It's not the virus that causes COVID nineteen. It's a different harmless virus, but it enters your muscle cells and uses the cell's machinery to produce a harmless piece of what it's called a spike protein that then triggers an immune response to build antibodies. So I thought it was really interesting that again, like this was so predictive of like that's we had a pandemic.

8:56 The vaccine that they came up with to help people protect themselves from this disease was similar to what happens at the end of World War see, So I thought that was just really interesting. And then you get to the end and it's like there's this montage of people getting vaccinated and then signs of hope, and then things sort of seem like maybe there's a chance for them to go back to kind of normal, and it's like now it's like, now we have this kind of hangover where we're like, did that happen? Do we all it's a nightmare that we all had together, Like it's it's um. Yeah, I thought I thought it was a really interesting rewatch post COVID, Like it kind of made the movie like five times better because you know, when you when you watch it back into tels thirteen, like this's kind of cool, interesting what if? But now watching it and seeing how much stuff they pretty correctly predicted about how people would react to this kind of thing.

9:50 Yeah, it's just it just adds because the whole idea is if for you, we really entertained by this movie, you have to buy into it as real and that's way easier to now because so much of it echoes things that we have since experienced. So I think World was like low key is actually kind of great, and I really would encourage you to rewatch it if you only saw it once when it came out. I think it's a very interesting rewatch post pandemic. That is the show for today. As always, if you enjoy the show, you can always hit me up at benamore Dan on Twitter, watch this on Instagram, watch this Tonight podcast on TikTok, or you can join our Facebook group. Thank you for listening. Until next time,