The War to End All Wars
I just watched World War Z. Why I watched it is a long and tedious tale, full of boredom and ennui, signifying nothing. Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t normally watch a fantasy film, let alone a zombie film but, you know, events conspired. I blame Will Smith. The last zombie film I watched was I Am Legend, which turned out to be pretty good. So, I thought, maybe WWZ could repeat the miracle.
What a fool I was.
Before I tell you why WWZ was a bitter disappointment and reaffirmed all my prejudices against zombie films and other fantasy sub-genres, let me first say that it was a rollicking good adventure story with lots of running about shooting and blowing things up, it didn’t have too much extreme violence or gore, and Brad Pitt was pretty likeable in the role. There was no character development (barely any characterisation, as such) but that’s OK. This was a movie, after all, not a book (yes, I know there’s a book too – I won’t be reading it) and you don’t expect anything as fancy as character development in an action movie. (Why waste time on words when you could fit in another ten minutes of running around bashing zombies on the head?) Also, big plus, the special effects were pretty cool.
You see? I don’t ask much of my action movies. Yet WWZ managed to offend me all the same.
If you haven’t seen the film yet, be warned, there are spoilers ahead.
I was almost about to give the movie a pass when Our Hero staggered out of a plane crash near Cardiff and into a WHO lab. Until that point, no-one had really tried to explain the zombies. Yes, the UN was treating it as a global pandemic and their tame scientist was sure it was a virus infection. But the virologist gets killed almost as soon as they can decently do away with him and I thought, “Whoopee! That’s the end of that nonsense.”
But it wasn’t.
The WHO scientists trashed the whole film for me when they started musing on the possibility of giving the zombies some other kind of lethal infection (they’d even tried it, apparently). It didn’t work – couldn’t possibly work, they explained – because you can’t infect something that’s already dead and has no circulatory system. And there it was. The zombies were actually dead. They walked around, they ran around, expending masses of energy, they were “sentient” as one scientist told us, despite the fact that their brains should have putrefied very quickly without blood flowing to them, and yet all these scientists were standing around talking about it as if it was just another scientific puzzle, not a complete bloody impossibility. The zombies were obviously animated by magic, not by any natural process. Then Our Hero came up with a crazy scheme to infect living humans with deadly diseases so that the zombies wouldn’t try to infect them with their zombie magic because, for some unexplained reason, the magic zombies – which are dead, remember and can’t be infected – didn’t want to prey on sick humans.
If they’d just left it that the damned zombies were magic and hadn’t tried to find a scientific way to save the day, the film would have been a million times better. But – and here’s the stinger for me – once you start trying to mix real science with magic, you get an absolute mess, a hotchpotch of pseudoscientific rubbish that is an insult to the intelligence. Yes, I was watching a zombie film. Yes, zombies are magic so, yes, I was prepared to suspend my disbelief, but Oh God Why do they always think that adding a load of rubbish science to a fantasy film makes it somehow more plausible or credible? It doesn’t. It ruins the magic world the writer has created and makes the silly magic stuff seem even more outrageously stupid. How can you keep up the struggle to suspend your disbelief when the writer keeps tugging your sleeve and saying, “No, no, this is real. There really could be undead humans running around in a world which is otherwise perfectly rational.”
Look guys, if medicines work, if we understand human biology well enough to manufacture cures for diseases, then zombies don’t exist. They only ever could exist in a world where the WHO scientists, confronted with the problem, say, “There’s no point even thinking about a cure or a defence based on medical knowledge, biology and chemistry, because the existence of zombies proves that every bloody thing we know is wrong.”
And, lest you think I’m being especially unkind to zombie writers, let me generalise it to the whole of fantasy. There is no point adding real science or real technology to a fantasy story of any description. All those writers who like to point out that in mediaeval times a bowman could only shoot an arrow thus far, or a horse can only gallop for so many minutes, are just wasting their time. Once you have included magic in your story, you have told us all that the laws of nature are so far removed from what we see around us, that you might as well make anything happen. Forcing the tensile strength of wood and bowstring and human sinews to be what they are in reality just makes no sense at all. Why should they be special when fundamental laws of physics are broken with impunity elsewhere?
It’s the fact that the laws of physics are just that – laws – that makes magic impossible in the first place. So, if you create a world in which they can be mangled, I’m OK with that, but please don’t try to tell me that the interior angles of a triangle must still add up to 180 degrees because that is just arbitrary and jerks me out of the story as much as it would if Arthur C. Clarke had opened up Rama to reveal a magic porridge pot inside.
So, World War Z might well be the very last zombie film I ever watch. And, honestly, that will not be a big loss.
