SYNOPSIS
The film, a loose adaptation of Max Brooks’s bestseller World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, is directed by Marc Forster. Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a United Nations researcher who must leave his family in the care of the military and go on a globe-trotting quest to trace the origins of the pandemic turning humanity into reanimated flesh-eaters. It’s a race against time to get to the bottom of the disease before our whole species is overtaken. (source: iamrogue.com)
There has been a slew of new posters and banners released for World War Z in the last week or so, most notably in the last 24 hours or so when a series of international banners showing destruction in various world cities hit the internet along with the following new poster for international audiences:
This latest poster is quite telling.
It’s the first time we see Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) and his family right in the midst of the apocalypse itself.
Granted the trailer does show them running in panic through the streets of New York in the early stages of the disaster but you don’t see any zombies hot on their heels at that stage, and then later on they are usually far below them, with the threat visible but not close and menacing.
But here they are very close, they are very menacing, and it underscores that no one is safe, not even Gerry’s family as the US Commander on board the aircraft carrier makes abundantly clear to him.
No one is safe indeed.
Any thoughts I had that Australia might be relatively safe thanks to its isolation – an isolation that has been admittedly whittled down to pretty much nothing by jet travel and the internet – have been ripped to fast-moving zombie-ripping shreds by the banner above which shows my beloved home city of Sydney in flames, and awash in fleeing crowds and hungry pestilent undead.
Quite apart from making the nightly commute far more problematic than usual – although you could well argue that the herd mentality of most commuters surging up and down the stairs at rail stations in peak hour is not that different to a zombie horde – it means that any hopes I had that we’d escape unscathed are gone, baby, gone.
The same goes for Rome …
And Berlin …
I think the editor of gizmodo.com, , had the right idea when he said:
“… one assumes that if the zombie apocalypse comes to Sydney, your editor will be locked up inside with a shotgun and a bottle of scotch.”
Got room for one more? I think my train may be a little delayed …