world war z

Just saw this terrorizing zombie flick which has Brad Pitt in it, he is rather good but every time he’s onscreen you go Oh look! It’s Brad Pitt! Such an awful experience and I feel traumatized. I feel like a zombie, if a zombie is the ultimate sociopath: no emotion, no response. Cycling home through the cool breezy night I was looking fearfully over my shoulder, left and right, cowering when a bus came past. Apart from fear I’m feeling nothing. Hackneyed exaggerations like ‘dead inside’ seem to me reasonable truisms. The friend I went with, a fan of zombie movies who found this gorefest ‘bloodless’, wants to know isn’t there any sensation of relief? What, that the movie is finally over? That of all the billions of diverse and pulsating people on this earth, one square-jawed blond actor and his immediate family, plus token brown-skinned boy, survived? This… is hope? All the nauseating violence and mean-skinned machine-gunning and desperate stratagems by ill-prepared people have worn me through. My emotions are spent. Then again it was melodramatic and ridiculous, but sore. I’ve never seen a film like this before and never want to again. It was so overwhelming that the nett result seems to me a sodden desensitization. Who made the word zombie, when was this thing dreamed up? Ugh. And only now, writing, do I realize the title of this terrible movie is literal as well as hyperbolic. How exhausting.

A side-note: Brad Pitt is extremely good-looking. I never really noticed it before. I guess that sounds ridiculous. I mean, he’s built well, he has a sturdy face that takes expression. My companion said: wasn’t there anything that you liked? I like that it’s over. I like that the artificial bowels-of-the-pyramid architecture of major cinemas does not prevail everywhere. I liked the girl who was brave when he cut her arm off. I found it amusing, or do I mean dispiriting, that they had four accountants just for payroll; 49 stuntpersons; five times as many digital effects artists. I liked the ice cream, from an Italian stall that was locked up when we came out. I liked taking off the 3D glasses. I like the quietude.