If John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids influenced the post apocalyptic trajectory of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s science fiction-horror 28 Days Later (2002) then it is a novel which reaches back to the past and affects the present day consciousness of Hollywood cinema. For a long time, the undead was fragmented from the gothic into the vampire and zombie film. Perhaps the one pre-28 days Later text cited by many attempting a new variation on the zombie film was Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Although Romero modernised the zombie flick by saturating the narrative with a socio-political perspective, it wasn’t long before parody rendered Romero’s dead films as a mute point in terms of zombie referencing. If cinema has secretly longed for the end of the world with its endless post apocalyptic fantasies then 28 Days Later merged familiar horror idioms with an underlining nastiness about the human condition. 28 Days Later repressed the zombie, perpetuating a forgotten horror trope – the infected. More importantly, the resurrection of the infected as a post 9-11 horror convention laid bare an allegorical opportunism that projected a plethora of geopolitical anxieties. Whereas the zombie was an icon of the undead, the infected after 9-11 seemed logical since ideological infection was rife, contagious yet somewhat inexplicable in a world being reconfigured by demagogues and iconoclasts. If 28 Days Later led to a new interest and revival in zombie cinema then it also spawned a line of post apocalyptic films with the infected as an allegorical catalyst. In other words, zombies representing no real social or political threat rendered them essentially irrelevant and this meant reiterating their presence in horror films as nothing but gore. The infected on the other hand isn’t as empty when it comes to ideological interpretation and the ‘rage’ virus in 28 Days Later sought to situate the symptoms of the infected in contemporary social reality.
World War Z, a post apocalyptic blockbuster, takes a similar premise as 28 Days Later and gives it an international context by transforming the central protagonist of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) into a global citizen, travelling to places such as New York, Jerusalem and Cardiff in order to find a vaccine to an unexplained infection. Typically in such post apocalyptic Hollywood narratives, the central protagonist would either by an ordinary individual, extension of the government or someone with a past in the military. Given the presence of Brad Pitt in the main lead and who also acts as a producer on the film, it’s not surprising that his ties to the UN in the film constructs him as a global citizen and since much of the film takes place internationally rather than typically in America (as do so many Disaster/post apocalyptic films), an attempt is made to refashion the end of the world scenario as a globalist allegory. Given the current civil unrest brought on by the failings of market liberalism and the end of capitalism, allegorically the sense of destruction envisioned in the film is less of a warning about populist resistance and more of a semi-meditation on global interconnectedness stemming from multi protagonist films such as Syriana and Babel. While the film is ambitious in terms of reinvigorating the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, the attempts to narrate a seemingly intelligent story is crudely interrupted by a series of well-executed but immaterial set pieces. Bookended with the instrumentals of Muse, World War Z is a mildly diverting blockbuster that is likely to grow as a potential franchise for Paramount and Brad Pitt. If we get a sequel, the mention of the infection originating from India in the film points to a likely South Asian geographical context.
Movie Mahal 