I apologize to the proprietors and patrons of Martino’s Quick Eats. I overreacted today. Following my screening of World War Z, I immediately went down to the track and ran. And ran, and ran. I looped through my Zune playlist two and a half times. My knees finally quit during the day’s eighth chorus of “I Do” by Lisa Loeb. Tired and worn, I craved nothing more than an ice cool Shasta, so of course I went down to Martino’s, my hometown’s treasured convenience shoppe.

I know that zombies are fake. Of course they are. But this clarity comes to me only after having several hours to reflect in my eight-by-eight cell at the county correctional facility. For the past decade though, there have been so many zombie movies, World War Z being the latest, that my fragile mind has struggled to maintain the dichotomy between the world where the dead stay dead and the world where they get really irritable. When I entered the theater, I still had a firm grip on reality. But then I saw the credits: “Based on the novel by Max Brooks”. A novel of course indicates a work of fiction, but I only just found that out from my cellmate Darius. Many years back, on my SATs, I selected a multiple choice answer indicating that a novel was “a true to the word, fully rendered exposition of the real world”, and have just rolled with that ever since. My analysis of 1984 for the essay question ended up being horribly, horribly off, thus I had to spend six years at junior college before starting my apprenticeship as a machinist. My career’s slow start now pales in significance though to my tragic overestimation of the imminent danger of a zombie invasion.

The World War Z zombies are not your average mofos. They can run like hell, and jump, and climb, and tackle. They’re the 28 Days Later zombies at the NFL combine. And while I was convinced that the super-agile-zombie apocalypse was very real, we all know that Brad Pitt is not. It’s up to us to save ourselves. So after I worked my legs into shape, I entered Martino’s, hoping to convince some of the folks there to join me in the morning for a light jogging session, getting the whole town prepped to sprint for shelter when the zombies run wild. Instead though, I snapped. The first thing I saw when the automatic door slid open was the cashier, with no shame, handing a fresh pack of Twizzlers to Petey MacIntyre, the fattest man in town. Convinced that the cashier was simply trying to create more out-of-shape victims for the imminent zombie invasion, I went on a rampage against high-fat foods. The first thing I did was crush all the milk cartons containing the 1% or whole variety. At that point, I probably could have pled down to a misdemeanor, but I crossed the line when I grabbed a Twizzler from Petey, tossed him to the floor, and lashed him repeatedly with the sweet licorice. “Run Petey, you must live!” I screamed, as Martino himself emerged from the back room to restrain me. As he ripped the Twizzler from my grasp, the crimes I had just committed finally came into focus. I broke down, and Martino tried to comfort me, but I was inconsolable. I promptly surrendered to the authorities, resigned to writing this review from a prison bunk.

Pitt harkens back to his pre-superstar glory days with this one, re-upping his exquisite True Romance hairdo for one more go-around. This alone puts a floor in yours truly’s review score at 5/10; Pitt’s character in that film, Floyd, is the direct inspiration for James Franco’s character, Saul, in Pineapple Express, which is still the best film to grace Pan-American cinema since Mission Accomplished in Iraq. In the opening scenes of World War Z, when Pitt is gallivanting around the house with his family, you can even detect in his voice just a hint of his former stoner self’s tonal inflection, but the director quashes it pretty quickly.

With Pitt’s entry into the zombie horror genre, he has also captured the title of Best Looking Guy in a Movie with Raging Undead, ripping it from the grasp of 28 Days Later’s Cillian Murphy. America: 1, UK and Ireland: 0. Honorable mention goes to Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead.

After the very brief opening formalities of Pitt chowing down breakfast with the wife and two daughters, the action kicks into full gear, and does not stop (well, it does… keep reading). They get caught off guard, along with the entirety of the city, in the zombie epidemic as it strikes downtown Philadelphia. The quick, indefensible spread of zombie-dom can be attributed to the lightning-quick gestation of the virus, or whatever it is; when someone is bitten, it takes no more than ten seconds for them to re-animate as a full-fledged raging zombie. There’s none of the nonsense pomp and circumstance of saying a final goodbye to a loved one before they are transformed, and there’s no chance at escape.

World War Z affects a subtle shift in worldview from recent installments in the zombie genre. The characters live in a world where all of those other zombie movies exist, and people are aware of the apparent absurdity of the symptoms being exhibited by the victims. However, the movie appropriately removes any time for the characters to fully reflect on the existential implications of a supposedly fictional affliction running wild in the real world. The spread is too mercilessly quick, too violent to be able to worry about anything other than containing it. World War Z creates this terrifying sense of urgency as effectively as any disaster film. Even when Pitt gains brief respite from direct battle with the zombies, there is no avoiding the grim eventuality that pretty soon all of Earth will be engulfed by this pandemic, and that time will come much sooner than later.

Brad Pitt is as important to this movie from both a box office and character perspective as in any other film he’s done. He’s the only actor even resembling an A-lister, and he’s in every frame. He’s also essential to the perfect pacing that defines the film for the greater part of its runtime. Crazy things are happening really quick, but the viewer is able to center on Pitt in order to maintain one’s bearings. It’s a clinic on how to do an epic disaster movie: get a movie star, center him in the frame, and use him to convey the emotions that the audience should feel, as confusing, unprecedented things go on all around him. Pitt’s character, Gerry Lane, formerly held an important though unspecified job at the UN, and he is now being called back into service given his warzone experience. Gerry Lane becomes our window into the disaster as seen from the highest echelons of power. Pitt excels here in his dual role from the audience’s perspective: as the trustworthy, intelligent guy next door, and as a competent field operative relied upon by the world’s leaders. A lesser movie star would shrink in this role. Because it’s Pitt, we don’t need tons of character exposition; we see him in the first scene chilling out with his family, and that’s all we need to know about him. This allows the subsequent dialogue to just concentrate on the practical issue of how to stop the zombie outbreak, with the pacing of the discourse therefore perfectly matching the relentlessness of the action.

All of the praises I just sang to the high heavens apply to the first two-thirds of the movie. In the third act, everything that made World War Z an exceptional display of moviemaking abruptly terminates. The desperation we feel with Pitt as he jetsets around the globe, desperate to stay one step ahead of the zombies, is completely removed for the film’s final sequences. From a purely physical perspective, people and zombies in the early stages of the film were moving, all the time. There was a refreshing lack of BS in every scene, like these filmmakers were really on the ball. Now, everyone’s just standing around deliberating on what to do next, the exact opposite of what made the beginning so satisfying. We’re left with an ending rendered irrelevant by its boringness, even if appropriate from a narrative perspective. The failed final act therefore leaves the whole experience as solidly above average, which is tragic considering it could have been one of the better movies of the year.

It’s time to hit the showers here at the correctional facility, so I’ve gotta wrap this up. The food here’s been pretty terrible, but I hear a bunch of guys chanting “fresh fish”, which sounds pretty awesome right about now. I’ll grab my towel and head down to the stalls. I’ll check back in with you later.