Welcome back for another look at one of the featured Letterboxd Lists! This week we take a look at a list of movies that have been watched by at least one million Letterboxd users. You guessed it, it’s the Letterboxd One Million Watched Club list! As of this writing, there are 608 films on that list. We’ll be taking a look at one that, as of today, has been watched 1.4 million times… World War Z (2013).
Title: World War Z
Director: Marc Forster
Released: June 19, 2013 (New Zealand)
Runtime: 1 hour 56 minutes
Watched on: MGM+, also currently available on Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock, and Kanopy
Former UN investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) sits trapped in Philadelphia traffic with his wife, Karin (Mireille Enos), and their two daughters. All of a sudden, absolute chaos unfolds as a zombie outbreak occurs. Thanks to a runaway truck and an unsuspecting family in a nearby apartment building, Gerry and his family manage to escape.
Turns out it helps to have Thierry (Fana Mokoena), the UN deputy secretary-general, on your side. He was able to arrange for a helicopter to pick up Gerry and his family from atop the apartment building.
Eventually, they land on a Navy ship in the middle of the Atlantic. While nobody seems to know how or why the outbreak happened, there are scientists onboard actively working to find a cure. The general consensus is that a virus caused the outbreak.
Everyone’s best chance for survival is for them to find the origin of this virus. Reluctantly, Gerry agrees to join the team in search of the origin of the virus. Their first stop takes them to South Korea and while they find some useful information, they don’t find what they came for.
Is Gerry on a futile globetrotting adventure?
Or will he be able to save humanity?
Well, one thing is for sure, these aren’t your run-of-the-mill zombies.
While there are some exceptions, for the most part, zombies tend to be terrifying yet incredibly slow creatures. As soon as we learn that the zombies here can flat out sprint, I was in. Zombies that you can’t outrun, what’s more terrifying than that?
Seeing this for the first time a little over twelve years after it released, it holds up pretty well from a visual standpoint. Yes, there are some wide shots with some CGI that probably didn’t even look all that great by 2013 standards. However, as a whole, the design of the zombies, special effects, and production design still can hold their own.
As for the story, it can’t quite figure out what it wants to be. There are horror elements, obviously with the zombies, but it is more of an action adventure than anything else. We also spend a lot of time establishing Gerry as this loving family man, only for his family to be all but an afterthought in the second half of the film.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with World War Z (2013). Whether you’ve seen it before or not, go ahead and add it to your list for zombie watches this October.
So, if you have seen World War Z (2013) before, what did you think?
Hit me with your thoughts in the comments below or over on Bluesky!
As always, you can follow me over on Letterboxd to keep up with everything else I’ve watched lately.