World War Z 10 Years Later (Netflix)

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Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore.

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I'm a producer, writer of film
and television and now a podcast producer.

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And despite having every streaming service,
I never know what to watch. So

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anytime I watch something good, I
talk about it on the show. This

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way, you'll never have the same
problem I do. I watch this tonight.

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There's always something good to watch.
Let's get started. Today in the

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show, we are talking about World
War Z. So it's ten years later

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World War Z. Is it came
out? Yeah? So it came out

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exactly almost to the day, ten
years ago. It's an incredible rewatch post

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pandemic because it's really a movie about
how different nations around the world deal with

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an existential endemic threat, and we
have seen that in real life, so

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it watching it is such a different
experience now than it was when it actually

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came out. I watched it on
Netflix and it's actually leaving Netflix on June

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thirtieth, so if you're curious to
rewatch it, you have five days when

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this comes out, basically to watch
it. Watching this movie made me think

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a lot about the early days of
COVID because one of the best parts of

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the film is the initial turn from
everything's normal to the whole world is upside

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down. In the early days of
COVID, I remember reading tweets from people

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in Italy and they were talking about
how severe COVID was in Italy, and

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tweets some doctors how overwhelmed their system
was, and you know, regular citizens

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about how much it totally affected their
lives. And I remember seeing those and

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thinking, you know, specifically,
that was the moment for me where I

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was like, this is definitely coming
to America and it's going to be severe.

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And now that we're sort of,
you know, we're not totally past

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it. I mean, COVID still
is a thing that exists, but in

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terms of how it is affecting our
lives, we kind of aren't past it.

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I think about this all the time, like, you know, now

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I go to the grocery store and
you know, it's it's just it's almost

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like back to normal. It's like
nothing it has so drastically reduced the volume

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of how severe this was, but
it was like a defining thing of our

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lives for what like two years.
It's almost like a dream, like it's

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like it's it's so strange that that
happened, and the feeling of that of

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going to sort of headfirst into something
so severe where you know, I mean,

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at the height COVID, I'm trying
to remember in America what our death

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toll per day was, but I
think we were topping a thousand dead per

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day. And then you know,
coming out of it, and the sort

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of like whoa, you know,
surreal nature of coming out of it,

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that's all felt. And World War
Z. There's a great speech from a

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character that Brad Pitt Meet meets who's
a virologist, and he's talking about viruses

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and mother Nature. It's impossible to
watch that speech and not think about COVID.

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One of the elements of the story
that's really interesting is that Israel does

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a great job initially at protecting against
the zombies, which in the case of

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COVID, and I know because I
have family members who you know, wanted

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to travel to Israel during the pandemic, they were equally severe. They basically

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was like a two week quarantine.
No matter what, we don't care who

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you are. What's the situation is
you try to come to Israel's two week

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quarantine and kind of it's echoed in
the movie where Israel initially is very effective

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at repelling, you know, finding
a way to safeguard themselves against the zombies.

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You also just kind of forget.
I mean, I think again,

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I don't know. At the time, you know, we were sort of

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zombies were becoming like very in vogue, and so we saw a lot of

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zombie stuff, and you know,
I think it was easy to kind of

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take where we're seeing for granted,
we're looking back at it. It's really

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good, Like it's it's so well
paced. That was something that it's very

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noticeable to me on the rewatch.
I watched it this morning at like five

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am, and I paused at one
point and I was like, I've probably

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watched maybe like thirty forty five mention. No, I watched an hour.

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It went by in like the blink
of an eye. It's so fast paced,

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it's so good. I'm retroactively even
less enthusiastic about Secret Invasion. Oh,

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not that they say, but there
are elements of them that have some

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relation to each other. It's very
well made. There's a lot in it

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that I was very impressed with.
It's there's a moment particularly that I want

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to highlight. Brad Pitt is on
this plane and he's kind of looking out

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the window, and I think the
pilot is also looking out the window,

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and like they both see that someone
has nuked something. Clearly that's what happened,

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and everyone kind of looks at it
and it's just not discussed. And

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the fact that that's just thrown off
as a casual detail I thought was really

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great. It was really effective.
Great use of fast zombies. You know,

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I think the slow zombies. You
know, it's so interesting that how

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many the fast zombies. I think
it's just way scarier. You know,

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It's like the the inclusion of fast
zombies. The switch to fast zombies is

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just a better idea. You know, I think that slow zombies there's a

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purity to it, right. I
think purists of the zombie genre might prefer

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that. But once they introduced the
fast zombies, as far as I was

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concerned, it's like going back.
You gotta stick with the fast zombies.

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That's what makes the movie so freaky
and scary is that the zombies are like

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they're like almost like a living,
breathing entity as a whole. That's what

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the sequence with the wall in Israel
is so freaky. When they're climbing on

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top of each other and fallen off
and all that. In general it has

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it has like five great sequences.
The Philly sequence at the beginning where you

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go from normal to oh shit,
like this is happening and it feels real.

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It feels like, oh man,
if this happened in real life,

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it's probably how it happened. The
sequence in New York with the roof,

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the Israel wall sequence, there's a
great plane sequence I think for the Rector

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mark Forrester. Definitely his most entertaining
film, and it's when you watch it,

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it's such a big world. The
international quality of it, right,

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seeing all the different countries and how
they handle this situation differently, and that's

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so interesting. There's so much to
explore there, and it's hard not to

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watch it and think, man,
what could have been? Because they had

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a sequel. I did a little
research into it. It was ready to

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go completely. There's a quote somewhere
on the internet from Mimura Enos and she

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says something the effective like, we
had David Fincher, we had a great

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script, we had Brad Pitt,
we were ready to start production, and

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ultimately the studio kind of pulled the
plug because China does not allow zombie films,

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and they just didn't want to make
this big, expensive movie without China

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as a potential market. But it's
so tantalizing to think, Man, what

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would David Fincher have done with something
like this, because he hasn't really I

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looked at his filmography, he hasn't
really done anything like that. It's a

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big, giant zombie epic. David
Fincher, what would that happen? Like?

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I rewatched this movie and I thought
a lot about The Gray Man,

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which you know, probably a significantly
higher budget, just as much action,

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but totally did not engage me at
all. And this movie engaged me from

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minute one to the end. And
it's I think pretty well written. You

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know, the quieter moments, the
character moments building, the characters who interacts

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with briefly, great cast, some
great James Badge Dale in this movie,

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the actress who plays the Israeli soldier, her relationship with Brad Pitt. That's

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all really good. And the third
act, you know, a lot of

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was made of this at the time
that you know, they had to spend

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so much money to redo the whole
third act, a very expensive decision.

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I think it costs them like ninety
million dollars or something like that. But

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it's great. It's a really smart
decision to go small rather than keep trying

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to top yourself, which it would
be impossible. It's such a big movie.

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And then even the ending, again
in a post COVID kind of age,

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the ending is prescient because the cure
is you have to infect yourself with

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something bad and then it makes your
body like it protects you against something worse,

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essentially, So knowing that, I
actually I literally looked up, like,

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how does the COVID virus work?
Vaccine work? And apparently, according

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to the Internet, the way the
COVID vaccine works not suddenly turns this into

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a show bad of vaccines, but
the idea of the vaccine is that you

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get a viral vector. It's not
the virus that causes COVID nineteen. It's

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a different harmless virus, but it
enters your muscle cells and uses the cell's

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machinery to produce a harmless piece of
what it's called a spike protein that then

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triggers an immune response to build antibodies. So I thought it was really interesting

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that again, like this was so
predictive of like that's we had a pandemic.

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The vaccine that they came up with
to help people protect themselves from this

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disease was similar to what happens at
the end of World War see, So

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I thought that was just really interesting. And then you get to the end

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and it's like there's this montage of
people getting vaccinated and then signs of hope,

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and then things sort of seem like
maybe there's a chance for them to

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go back to kind of normal,
and it's like now it's like, now

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we have this kind of hangover where
we're like, did that happen? Do

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we all it's a nightmare that we
all had together, Like it's it's um.

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Yeah, I thought I thought it
was a really interesting rewatch post COVID,

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Like it kind of made the movie
like five times better because you know,

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when you when you watch it back
into tels thirteen, like this's kind

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of cool, interesting what if?
But now watching it and seeing how much

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stuff they pretty correctly predicted about how
people would react to this kind of thing.

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Yeah, it's just it just adds
because the whole idea is if for

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you, we really entertained by this
movie, you have to buy into it

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as real and that's way easier to
now because so much of it echoes things

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that we have since experienced. So
I think World was like low key is

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actually kind of great, and I
really would encourage you to rewatch it if

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you only saw it once when it
came out. I think it's a very

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interesting rewatch post pandemic. That is
the show for today. As always,

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if you enjoy the show, you
can always hit me up at benamore Dan

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on Twitter, watch this on Instagram, watch this Tonight podcast on TikTok,

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or you can join our Facebook group. Thank you for listening. Until next time,