June 26, 2023 • 10 mins
Watching this film post-COVID pandemic has made it 10 times more compelling. So much of the film feels even more real and credible given the echoes of our experiences during the pandemic. It flies by with great pacing, stellar action, and intriguing cross-cultural differences in how different countries handle a zombie apocalypse. Was this a great movie we kind of underrated back in 2013?
Trying to figure out, "What should I stream tonight?" Come back to Watch This Tonight as your podcast for the best TV recommendations for what to watch on streaming platforms. Please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts if you're enjoying the show, and mention a movie or TV show you want me to cover (and I will). Subscribe for future episodes.
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Watch This Tonight is a movie recommendation podcast and TV recommendation podcast, produced by Voyage Media. You can find other Voyage Media podcasts at voyagemedia.fm
Thanks for listening.
Trying to figure out, "What should I stream tonight?" Come back to Watch This Tonight as your podcast for the best TV recommendations for what to watch on streaming platforms. Please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts if you're enjoying the show, and mention a movie or TV show you want me to cover (and I will). Subscribe for future episodes.
Reach out to us @BenamorDan (Twitter), watch_this_tonight (Instagram) or @watchthistonightpodcast (TikTok).
Watch This Tonight is a movie recommendation podcast and TV recommendation podcast, produced by Voyage Media. You can find other Voyage Media podcasts at voyagemedia.fm
Thanks for listening.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore.
(00:22):
I'm a producer, writer of filmand television and now a podcast producer.
And despite having every streaming service,I never know what to watch. So
anytime I watch something good, Italk about it on the show. This
way, you'll never have the sameproblem I do. I watch this tonight.
There's always something good to watch.Let's get started. Today in the
show, we are talking about WorldWar Z. So it's ten years later
(00:44):
World War Z. Is it cameout? Yeah? So it came out
exactly almost to the day, tenyears ago. It's an incredible rewatch post
pandemic because it's really a movie abouthow different nations around the world deal with
an existential endemic threat, and wehave seen that in real life, so
it watching it is such a differentexperience now than it was when it actually
(01:07):
came out. I watched it onNetflix and it's actually leaving Netflix on June
thirtieth, so if you're curious torewatch it, you have five days when
this comes out, basically to watchit. Watching this movie made me think
a lot about the early days ofCOVID because one of the best parts of
the film is the initial turn fromeverything's normal to the whole world is upside
(01:30):
down. In the early days ofCOVID, I remember reading tweets from people
in Italy and they were talking abouthow severe COVID was in Italy, and
tweets some doctors how overwhelmed their systemwas, and you know, regular citizens
about how much it totally affected theirlives. And I remember seeing those and
(01:51):
thinking, you know, specifically,that was the moment for me where I
was like, this is definitely comingto America and it's going to be severe.
And now that we're sort of,you know, we're not totally past
it. I mean, COVID stillis a thing that exists, but in
terms of how it is affecting ourlives, we kind of aren't past it.
I think about this all the time, like, you know, now
I go to the grocery store andyou know, it's it's just it's almost
(02:14):
like back to normal. It's likenothing it has so drastically reduced the volume
of how severe this was, butit was like a defining thing of our
lives for what like two years.It's almost like a dream, like it's
like it's it's so strange that thathappened, and the feeling of that of
going to sort of headfirst into somethingso severe where you know, I mean,
(02:38):
at the height COVID, I'm tryingto remember in America what our death
toll per day was, but Ithink we were topping a thousand dead per
day. And then you know,coming out of it, and the sort
of like whoa, you know,surreal nature of coming out of it,
that's all felt. And World WarZ. There's a great speech from a
character that Brad Pitt Meet meets who'sa virologist, and he's talking about viruses
(03:00):
and mother Nature. It's impossible towatch that speech and not think about COVID.
One of the elements of the storythat's really interesting is that Israel does
a great job initially at protecting againstthe zombies, which in the case of
COVID, and I know because Ihave family members who you know, wanted
to travel to Israel during the pandemic, they were equally severe. They basically
(03:22):
was like a two week quarantine.No matter what, we don't care who
you are. What's the situation isyou try to come to Israel's two week
quarantine and kind of it's echoed inthe movie where Israel initially is very effective
at repelling, you know, findinga way to safeguard themselves against the zombies.
You also just kind of forget.I mean, I think again,
(03:44):
I don't know. At the time, you know, we were sort of
zombies were becoming like very in vogue, and so we saw a lot of
zombie stuff, and you know,I think it was easy to kind of
take where we're seeing for granted,we're looking back at it. It's really
good, Like it's it's so wellpaced. That was something that it's very
noticeable to me on the rewatch.I watched it this morning at like five
am, and I paused at onepoint and I was like, I've probably
(04:08):
watched maybe like thirty forty five mention. No, I watched an hour.
It went by in like the blinkof an eye. It's so fast paced,
it's so good. I'm retroactively evenless enthusiastic about Secret Invasion. Oh,
not that they say, but thereare elements of them that have some
relation to each other. It's verywell made. There's a lot in it
(04:28):
that I was very impressed with.It's there's a moment particularly that I want
to highlight. Brad Pitt is onthis plane and he's kind of looking out
the window, and I think thepilot is also looking out the window,
and like they both see that someonehas nuked something. Clearly that's what happened,
and everyone kind of looks at itand it's just not discussed. And
the fact that that's just thrown offas a casual detail I thought was really
(04:53):
great. It was really effective.Great use of fast zombies. You know,
I think the slow zombies. Youknow, it's so interesting that how
many the fast zombies. I thinkit's just way scarier. You know,
It's like the the inclusion of fastzombies. The switch to fast zombies is
just a better idea. You know, I think that slow zombies there's a
(05:13):
purity to it, right. Ithink purists of the zombie genre might prefer
that. But once they introduced thefast zombies, as far as I was
concerned, it's like going back.You gotta stick with the fast zombies.
That's what makes the movie so freakyand scary is that the zombies are like
they're like almost like a living,breathing entity as a whole. That's what
the sequence with the wall in Israelis so freaky. When they're climbing on
(05:35):
top of each other and fallen offand all that. In general it has
it has like five great sequences.The Philly sequence at the beginning where you
go from normal to oh shit,like this is happening and it feels real.
It feels like, oh man,if this happened in real life,
it's probably how it happened. Thesequence in New York with the roof,
the Israel wall sequence, there's agreat plane sequence I think for the Rector
(06:00):
mark Forrester. Definitely his most entertainingfilm, and it's when you watch it,
it's such a big world. Theinternational quality of it, right,
seeing all the different countries and howthey handle this situation differently, and that's
so interesting. There's so much toexplore there, and it's hard not to
watch it and think, man,what could have been? Because they had
(06:20):
a sequel. I did a littleresearch into it. It was ready to
go completely. There's a quote somewhereon the internet from Mimura Enos and she
says something the effective like, wehad David Fincher, we had a great
script, we had Brad Pitt,we were ready to start production, and
ultimately the studio kind of pulled theplug because China does not allow zombie films,
(06:43):
and they just didn't want to makethis big, expensive movie without China
as a potential market. But it'sso tantalizing to think, Man, what
would David Fincher have done with somethinglike this, because he hasn't really I
looked at his filmography, he hasn'treally done anything like that. It's a
big, giant zombie epic. DavidFincher, what would that happen? Like?
(07:05):
I rewatched this movie and I thoughta lot about The Gray Man,
which you know, probably a significantlyhigher budget, just as much action,
but totally did not engage me atall. And this movie engaged me from
minute one to the end. Andit's I think pretty well written. You
know, the quieter moments, thecharacter moments building, the characters who interacts
(07:27):
with briefly, great cast, somegreat James Badge Dale in this movie,
the actress who plays the Israeli soldier, her relationship with Brad Pitt. That's
all really good. And the thirdact, you know, a lot of
was made of this at the timethat you know, they had to spend
so much money to redo the wholethird act, a very expensive decision.
I think it costs them like ninetymillion dollars or something like that. But
(07:49):
it's great. It's a really smartdecision to go small rather than keep trying
to top yourself, which it wouldbe impossible. It's such a big movie.
And then even the ending, againin a post COVID kind of age,
the ending is prescient because the cureis you have to infect yourself with
something bad and then it makes yourbody like it protects you against something worse,
(08:15):
essentially, So knowing that, Iactually I literally looked up, like,
how does the COVID virus work?Vaccine work? And apparently, according
to the Internet, the way theCOVID vaccine works not suddenly turns this into
a show bad of vaccines, butthe idea of the vaccine is that you
get a viral vector. It's notthe virus that causes COVID nineteen. It's
(08:35):
a different harmless virus, but itenters your muscle cells and uses the cell's
machinery to produce a harmless piece ofwhat it's called a spike protein that then
triggers an immune response to build antibodies. So I thought it was really interesting
that again, like this was sopredictive of like that's we had a pandemic.
(08:56):
The vaccine that they came up withto help people protect themselves from this
disease was similar to what happens atthe end of World War see, So
I thought that was just really interesting. And then you get to the end
and it's like there's this montage ofpeople getting vaccinated and then signs of hope,
and then things sort of seem likemaybe there's a chance for them to
go back to kind of normal,and it's like now it's like, now
(09:20):
we have this kind of hangover wherewe're like, did that happen? Do
we all it's a nightmare that weall had together, Like it's it's um.
Yeah, I thought I thought itwas a really interesting rewatch post COVID,
Like it kind of made the movielike five times better because you know,
when you when you watch it backinto tels thirteen, like this's kind
of cool, interesting what if?But now watching it and seeing how much
(09:41):
stuff they pretty correctly predicted about howpeople would react to this kind of thing.
Yeah, it's just it just addsbecause the whole idea is if for
you, we really entertained by thismovie, you have to buy into it
as real and that's way easier tonow because so much of it echoes things
(10:03):
that we have since experienced. SoI think World was like low key is
actually kind of great, and Ireally would encourage you to rewatch it if
you only saw it once when itcame out. I think it's a very
interesting rewatch post pandemic. That isthe show for today. As always,
if you enjoy the show, youcan always hit me up at benamore Dan
on Twitter, watch this on Instagram, watch this Tonight podcast on TikTok,
(10:24):
or you can join our Facebook group. Thank you for listening. Until next time,
Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore.
(00:22):
I'm a producer, writer of filmand television and now a podcast producer.
And despite having every streaming service,I never know what to watch. So
anytime I watch something good, Italk about it on the show. This
way, you'll never have the sameproblem I do. I watch this tonight.
There's always something good to watch.Let's get started. Today in the
show, we are talking about WorldWar Z. So it's ten years later
(00:44):
World War Z. Is it cameout? Yeah? So it came out
exactly almost to the day, tenyears ago. It's an incredible rewatch post
pandemic because it's really a movie abouthow different nations around the world deal with
an existential endemic threat, and wehave seen that in real life, so
it watching it is such a differentexperience now than it was when it actually
(01:07):
came out. I watched it onNetflix and it's actually leaving Netflix on June
thirtieth, so if you're curious torewatch it, you have five days when
this comes out, basically to watchit. Watching this movie made me think
a lot about the early days ofCOVID because one of the best parts of
the film is the initial turn fromeverything's normal to the whole world is upside
(01:30):
down. In the early days ofCOVID, I remember reading tweets from people
in Italy and they were talking abouthow severe COVID was in Italy, and
tweets some doctors how overwhelmed their systemwas, and you know, regular citizens
about how much it totally affected theirlives. And I remember seeing those and
(01:51):
thinking, you know, specifically,that was the moment for me where I
was like, this is definitely comingto America and it's going to be severe.
And now that we're sort of,you know, we're not totally past
it. I mean, COVID stillis a thing that exists, but in
terms of how it is affecting ourlives, we kind of aren't past it.
I think about this all the time, like, you know, now
I go to the grocery store andyou know, it's it's just it's almost
(02:14):
like back to normal. It's likenothing it has so drastically reduced the volume
of how severe this was, butit was like a defining thing of our
lives for what like two years.It's almost like a dream, like it's
like it's it's so strange that thathappened, and the feeling of that of
going to sort of headfirst into somethingso severe where you know, I mean,
(02:38):
at the height COVID, I'm tryingto remember in America what our death
toll per day was, but Ithink we were topping a thousand dead per
day. And then you know,coming out of it, and the sort
of like whoa, you know,surreal nature of coming out of it,
that's all felt. And World WarZ. There's a great speech from a
character that Brad Pitt Meet meets who'sa virologist, and he's talking about viruses
(03:00):
and mother Nature. It's impossible towatch that speech and not think about COVID.
One of the elements of the storythat's really interesting is that Israel does
a great job initially at protecting againstthe zombies, which in the case of
COVID, and I know because Ihave family members who you know, wanted
to travel to Israel during the pandemic, they were equally severe. They basically
(03:22):
was like a two week quarantine.No matter what, we don't care who
you are. What's the situation isyou try to come to Israel's two week
quarantine and kind of it's echoed inthe movie where Israel initially is very effective
at repelling, you know, findinga way to safeguard themselves against the zombies.
You also just kind of forget.I mean, I think again,
(03:44):
I don't know. At the time, you know, we were sort of
zombies were becoming like very in vogue, and so we saw a lot of
zombie stuff, and you know,I think it was easy to kind of
take where we're seeing for granted,we're looking back at it. It's really
good, Like it's it's so wellpaced. That was something that it's very
noticeable to me on the rewatch.I watched it this morning at like five
am, and I paused at onepoint and I was like, I've probably
(04:08):
watched maybe like thirty forty five mention. No, I watched an hour.
It went by in like the blinkof an eye. It's so fast paced,
it's so good. I'm retroactively evenless enthusiastic about Secret Invasion. Oh,
not that they say, but thereare elements of them that have some
relation to each other. It's verywell made. There's a lot in it
(04:28):
that I was very impressed with.It's there's a moment particularly that I want
to highlight. Brad Pitt is onthis plane and he's kind of looking out
the window, and I think thepilot is also looking out the window,
and like they both see that someonehas nuked something. Clearly that's what happened,
and everyone kind of looks at itand it's just not discussed. And
the fact that that's just thrown offas a casual detail I thought was really
(04:53):
great. It was really effective.Great use of fast zombies. You know,
I think the slow zombies. Youknow, it's so interesting that how
many the fast zombies. I thinkit's just way scarier. You know,
It's like the the inclusion of fastzombies. The switch to fast zombies is
just a better idea. You know, I think that slow zombies there's a
(05:13):
purity to it, right. Ithink purists of the zombie genre might prefer
that. But once they introduced thefast zombies, as far as I was
concerned, it's like going back.You gotta stick with the fast zombies.
That's what makes the movie so freakyand scary is that the zombies are like
they're like almost like a living,breathing entity as a whole. That's what
the sequence with the wall in Israelis so freaky. When they're climbing on
(05:35):
top of each other and fallen offand all that. In general it has
it has like five great sequences.The Philly sequence at the beginning where you
go from normal to oh shit,like this is happening and it feels real.
It feels like, oh man,if this happened in real life,
it's probably how it happened. Thesequence in New York with the roof,
the Israel wall sequence, there's agreat plane sequence I think for the Rector
(06:00):
mark Forrester. Definitely his most entertainingfilm, and it's when you watch it,
it's such a big world. Theinternational quality of it, right,
seeing all the different countries and howthey handle this situation differently, and that's
so interesting. There's so much toexplore there, and it's hard not to
watch it and think, man,what could have been? Because they had
(06:20):
a sequel. I did a littleresearch into it. It was ready to
go completely. There's a quote somewhereon the internet from Mimura Enos and she
says something the effective like, wehad David Fincher, we had a great
script, we had Brad Pitt,we were ready to start production, and
ultimately the studio kind of pulled theplug because China does not allow zombie films,
(06:43):
and they just didn't want to makethis big, expensive movie without China
as a potential market. But it'sso tantalizing to think, Man, what
would David Fincher have done with somethinglike this, because he hasn't really I
looked at his filmography, he hasn'treally done anything like that. It's a
big, giant zombie epic. DavidFincher, what would that happen? Like?
(07:05):
I rewatched this movie and I thoughta lot about The Gray Man,
which you know, probably a significantlyhigher budget, just as much action,
but totally did not engage me atall. And this movie engaged me from
minute one to the end. Andit's I think pretty well written. You
know, the quieter moments, thecharacter moments building, the characters who interacts
(07:27):
with briefly, great cast, somegreat James Badge Dale in this movie,
the actress who plays the Israeli soldier, her relationship with Brad Pitt. That's
all really good. And the thirdact, you know, a lot of
was made of this at the timethat you know, they had to spend
so much money to redo the wholethird act, a very expensive decision.
I think it costs them like ninetymillion dollars or something like that. But
(07:49):
it's great. It's a really smartdecision to go small rather than keep trying
to top yourself, which it wouldbe impossible. It's such a big movie.
And then even the ending, againin a post COVID kind of age,
the ending is prescient because the cureis you have to infect yourself with
something bad and then it makes yourbody like it protects you against something worse,
(08:15):
essentially, So knowing that, Iactually I literally looked up, like,
how does the COVID virus work?Vaccine work? And apparently, according
to the Internet, the way theCOVID vaccine works not suddenly turns this into
a show bad of vaccines, butthe idea of the vaccine is that you
get a viral vector. It's notthe virus that causes COVID nineteen. It's
(08:35):
a different harmless virus, but itenters your muscle cells and uses the cell's
machinery to produce a harmless piece ofwhat it's called a spike protein that then
triggers an immune response to build antibodies. So I thought it was really interesting
that again, like this was sopredictive of like that's we had a pandemic.
(08:56):
The vaccine that they came up withto help people protect themselves from this
disease was similar to what happens atthe end of World War see, So
I thought that was just really interesting. And then you get to the end
and it's like there's this montage ofpeople getting vaccinated and then signs of hope,
and then things sort of seem likemaybe there's a chance for them to
go back to kind of normal,and it's like now it's like, now
(09:20):
we have this kind of hangover wherewe're like, did that happen? Do
we all it's a nightmare that weall had together, Like it's it's um.
Yeah, I thought I thought itwas a really interesting rewatch post COVID,
Like it kind of made the movielike five times better because you know,
when you when you watch it backinto tels thirteen, like this's kind
of cool, interesting what if?But now watching it and seeing how much
(09:41):
stuff they pretty correctly predicted about howpeople would react to this kind of thing.
Yeah, it's just it just addsbecause the whole idea is if for
you, we really entertained by thismovie, you have to buy into it
as real and that's way easier tonow because so much of it echoes things
(10:03):
that we have since experienced. SoI think World was like low key is
actually kind of great, and Ireally would encourage you to rewatch it if
you only saw it once when itcame out. I think it's a very
interesting rewatch post pandemic. That isthe show for today. As always,
if you enjoy the show, youcan always hit me up at benamore Dan
on Twitter, watch this on Instagram, watch this Tonight podcast on TikTok,
(10:24):
or you can join our Facebook group. Thank you for listening. Until next time,
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