The film follows one man-Pitt's Gerry Lane (more on him later)-but the bigger picture is one of how thousands upon thousands of humans are squaring off against just as many undead. One of those elements of "real"-ness in World War Z is the overarching theme of how the populace worldwide would respond to a zombie outbreak, instead of focusing on a small group of survivors. “We weren’t trying to be like another movie," visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar recently told Wired about the painstaking modeling of the movie's "infected." "We were trying to be like, ‘What would be real? What would be the science behind it if this were real?'" It even ended with the passing of its hero. It set humanity - in deeply tumultuous times - against an ominous, dystopian backdrop that offered no solutions and presented death as random and senseless. Perhaps the most iconic notion of the zombie was defined in 1968 with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which turned the terrifying yet ultimately harmless zombies of the first half of the 20 th century into a mindless, brain-eating nightmare that most certainly would wipe out the human race. (Like, for example, the production of zombie ex-girlfriend shooting targets.) However, how zombie tales-and their fans-deal with these issues has proven as problematic as, well, the problems themselves. This continues a long and distinguished history of zombie themes standing in for au courant topics like slave rebellion, communism, über-capitalism, technophobia, and globalization. It's simply taking the idea of zombies as a surrogate for social anxieties in a new direction - in this case predominantly xenophobia and fears of viral outbreaks.
The flick threw a lot of walking-dead heritage under the bus, but that doesn't mean it won't have a place in the ongoing evolution of zombie lore. Their latest message, of course, lies in World War Z - the Brad Pitt vehicle that elevates the zombie outbreak metaphor to a global level.
In every case, for better or worse, the undead have defied their limited cognitive abilities to tell us something beyond, "Uuuunnnggnnn…" From their roots in Haitian folklore to their current incarnations as victims of a worldwide virus, zombies have for decades reflected the social anxieties of each generation.