I'm going to transfer over my post elsewhere discussing the various problems with this film.
First off, the premise of the zombie apocalypse. The virus somehow spreads fast enough that in 48 hours or less, the United States is almost totally overrun and the death toll is reaching 4 billion people. The zombies are ridiculously dangerous, because they have the headshot-only invulnerability of traditional zombies but the physics-defying strength, speed, and acrobatic skill of Twilight vampires. And they only pause long enough to bite a victim and run to infect another one, so one zombie can infect multiple people before it gets stopped. There's a throwaway mention early on of 12 countries reporting "rabies infestations." Keep in mind that it's later established that the military in various nations was fighting zombies (and even outright used the term "zombie" or "undead" in their communiques to other nations and governments), and Israel had the entirety of Jerusalem walled off about a week before the apocalypse hit. How on Earth is a plague this deadly and fast spreading supposed to remain 100% suppressed from the public when 12 countries are getting attacked by it?
Speaking of fast spread, it starts off with the main family in Philadelphia in gridlock. Police motorcycles are speeding between the cars, whole crowds are running screaming down the street.....and nobody has a clue what's going on until zombies are literally on top of them and eating them. What? Aside from the idea that a virus could go from "100% media suppression" to "Destroying an entire city and explosions going off every few seconds" being bollocks, is this a world without Twitter or radio? There's a quick shot of Brad Pitt getting static on the radio and someone taking iPhone video of the crashing garbage truck, but that's the only sign of any kind of media or social media response whatsoever.
Oh, that crashing garbage truck? It's a scene in the trailer: guy on a police bike is shouting "Stay in your vehicle!" at Brad Pitt and he gets creamed by an out-of-control truck. The first problem is that we saw the cop driving up to their car with a long shot that showed literally the entire street behind him, all the way to the T-intersection about a hundred yards down. It took less than 10 seconds from the cut to the cop for the truck to hit him. How is a garbage truck that is literally nonexistant supposed to turn onto a road and speed for 100 yards, crashing through every vehicle in its path, in less than 10 seconds? It would have had to have teleported right behind him. That teleportation is ALSO probably the explanation for why the truck makes literally no sound whatsoever until it hits him, at which point it's making all the noise expected of a garbage truck smashing gridlock out of the way hard enough to create a gap to drive an SUV through.
So Gerry goes off to South Korea and Israel to try and find the source of the cure. The virologist shipped off with him that's built up to be a part of the team and providing exposition on disease gets less than 5 minutes of total screentime over the course of maybe 15 or 20 minutes before he slips and shoots himself in the head. I'm not even kidding, folks. That's how he dies in his third scene.
In Jerusalem, the zombies end up piling over the wall like ants climbing an obstacle because they were attracted by the noise of a crowd (maybe the size of a medium concert crowd) singing. Sure, they did have a speaker and microphone (which was still quiet enough for people to casually chat as the singing went on), but how is it supposed to be louder than the entire sound of a city and the helicopters repeatedly flying over the crowd of zombies beforehand?
So in Jerusalem, Gerry sees a frail old man slowly walking down the street and a bald boy being ignored by the zombies (with the boy simply crouching in the middle of the horde and letting them run past him). It seems like they're going to reveal that zombies are attracted to motion and sound. There's even a scene on the airliner where the passengers in the uninfected compartment start making a barricade of luggage and the zombies never once notice them until a single suitcase drops, at which point they spill in like ants over a dropped Twinkie (the zombies are intentionally designed to resemble swarming insects).
Turns out what Gerry figured out was that the zombies don't attack people with terminal illnesses. Yeah, that's what he gleaned from everything. His plan?
Infect everyone with a lethal disease to act as camouflage, then kill all the zombies.
Yeah, I know.
Somehow it works, and somehow he picks the exact deadly disease (conveniently kept hidden from the audience) that can also be instantly cured with a single injection of a commonplace cure and maintains its camouflaging effect perfectly even after the curing. It's a deus ex machina that makes you laugh out loud when you first hear about it.
So the ending shows clips of people worldwide fighting zombies. And you know what? It looks more fun than the past 2 fucking hours! The Battle of Moscow is a bunch of husky Russians in a snowy city at night battling a horde with crowbars and other melee weapons, and it looks completely awesome, and it's only in the clip show for about a second. I can't imagine how much money and time was spent filming that epic battle, only for the movie to use a tiny snippet of it in the finale montage.
The zombies are explained as going dormant when no stimulus is around, which is meant to explain how they can ambush the heroes and give us tense scenes of people walking around just in time for a zombie to pop out and maul them. Except that the dormant zombies shown on screen are loudly moaning, walking around, and hitting crap. They're only silent when it's convenient for the plot to have them silent. Which gives us a hilarious scene early on in the Newark apartments where Gerry opens a door, starts by looking up at the stairwell (instead of, you know, in front of him), and the camera pans down just in time for a zombie to give us a jump scare. The framing of the scene implies that the zombie was staring at Gerry silently, intentionally waiting until Brad Pitt looked it in the eyes before attacking.
There's effectively no blood or gore whatsoever. Even when zombies and a single looter get shot, they don't have even a CGI squib to show the bullet impact. Anything more brutal than a gunshot is kept totally offscreen, which creates a hilarious scene where Gerry gets his crowbar stuck in a zombie's head and is trying to pull it out.....but the director won't actually show it. So it's just Brad Pitt vaguely tugging at something offscreen until his crowbar pops up. The CGI zombies often look utterly ridiculous, by the way. And there's thousands upon thousands of them, often defying the laws of physics.
One other hilarious bit with the zombies is that the director insists on having all of them rapidly clicking their teeth or making exaggerated biting motions when stimulated. There's an utterly abysmal shot (that actually made me laugh out loud, and apparently has made entire theaters burst into laughter) on the airliner of the first zombie to spot the barricaded passengers: as soon as it sees them, it begins stumbling at them and loudly making chomp-chomp bites at them while cocking its head forward like a chicken.
Early on, Gerry rescues a young boy who was the only survivor of the Newark apartment when zombies attacked his family. The boy only makes a handful of token appearances afterward, and seems to have absolutely zero problem with his entire family being mauled and transformed into zombies, including his zombified father being gunned down in front of him as he ran, screaming, in an attempt to eat his son.
In short, this movie is crap. It's not the product of 7 years of work, but the product of 7 years of nobody knowing what they actually wanted to make and making up the last 45 minutes at the last second because they didn't have a coherent ending; this sounds like hyperbole, but this is exactly what happened I'm not even bullshitting you. The novel was hardly a piece of art and it's got a ton of bad research and some downright insulting portrayals of the military, but it tried to be a serious human drama and the main focus was on overcoming human error and our own fatal flaws. The script leaked in 2008 tried to keep much of this, making it a serious, dramatic survival film about human nature interspersed with big action sequences. The movie is a big, dumb incoherent action film that doesn't know it yet.
