I originally saw World War Z when it first came out in theaters and had mixed feelings about it. Now I just picked up the extended cut for rather cheap on Cyber Monday so I figured I would give it another shot.

The troubled production of this movie and numerous rewrites did not ruin this film, but the film was still weak in a few areas.

If you look at the cast list, there are a whole lot of names that are unfamiliar. Brad Pitt is basically all you get, other than David Morse who is on screen for a total of about 10 minutes, and Matthew Fox who had something like 5 lines of dialogue. So if you don’t like Brad Pitt you’re not gonna like this movie.

Overall, the first 20 minutes or so are extremely tense. The initial outbreak in the city is some of the most nerve-racking moments in all of the movies that have come out this year. The tension doesn’t ever cease that is until the very end. The original idea was the movie ended with 2 more big battles, but the execs thought audiences would be too “battle fatigued.”

The movie follows Brad Pitt’s character Gerry Lane, a UN worker who has to search for the origins and hopefully a cure for the zombie disease.

The writing in the film isn’t the best. Characters are completely undeveloped. Some characters don’t even make sense. Like the little Mexican boy Brad Pitt’s who all of a sudden becomes a part of his family after he rescues him from an apartment early in the film. Pitt’s wife in the movie is also kind of a nuisance, her presence only seems to hinder Pitt’s character, yet he spends the whole movie trying to get back to her.

But the movie does one thing right; it adds something new to the zombie movie. Sure we have had running zombies, but this time we get to see the global impact of the outbreak. We aren’t stuck in the suburbs or the country or yet another shopping mall. It is the most “exotic” zombie movie to date. The other thing it does differently is the characters are trying to find a cure. In basically every other zombie movie, the characters are just trying to survive; they camp out somewhere and try to defend their territory, now we have characters going around the world and taking it back for the humans. Oh, and there are more zombies than we’ve ever seen before. Thousands and thousands of them, one scene in particular has them piling up to climb over a gigantic wall.

I enjoyed the movie better the second time. I knew what it was going to be this time around. The extended cut doesn’t really add anything new, other than just more blood in certain sequences.

So if you want a new take on the zombie film filled with globetrotting and zombies upon zombies upon zombies, then check this one out.