Photo: Paramount Pictures
The Super Bowl spot for “World War Z” —Brad Pitt’s troubled summer blockbuster—hit the Internet today. And considering the difficulty this movie has had to get to the silver screen, this spot should help calm fan fears that this disaster flick might be a disaster itself.
The thirty-second spot presents the film's story in miniature: Brad Pitt is the hero, being Brad Pitt, and a family man; he has a pretty wife and two cute daughters. The first hint of something wrong is when a motorcycle cop shears off the driver's side mirror of Pitt's car. He gets out to see what's happening, he hears a distant explosion and a voice yelling to “Get back in your car right now!” Then intercut with scenes of zombie chaos, we hear lines like “We've lost the East Coast” and “China's dark.” When a bewildered Pitt asked, “What is this?”—referring, presumably, to the epidemic of planet-wide mayhem—a tired-looking authority simply says, “We don’t know.”
“World War Z” has had a famously tortured production history, with highly publicized budget overruns—the total cost of the film is not known but suspected to be far beyond $200 million—and delays involving heavy (and also expensive) rewrites.
The film is based on Max Brooks' 2006 zombie apocalypse novel; many fans have complained about the apparent liberties director Marc Forster and Pitt, the producer of the film, have taken with the source material.
Compared to the previous trailer, this much-tighter spot cut focuses on the human characters, telling a fairly clear story about Pitt protecting his family. Whether that story resembles that of the movie as a whole, we'll find out June 13th.
But what do you think of this trailer as a trailer? Tell us in the comments.