9. The Pre-Outbreak Containment
Following on from the glossed-over Great Panic, you could go further and ask why the film didnt show the events leading up to it. While the film roughly explains the plagues origin and how it got into the country, theres no attention paid to how it spread from a few individuals to giant maraudering crowds. As it is, it just instantly chucks thousands of zombies at the screen and tells us to go with it. Once again, that may be fine for a regular zombie movie, but this isnt one World War Z was supposed to explore what sort of reaction was taken to the initial threat on a world-wide stage. In the book, different countries responded in different ways the North Koreans all went underground, the South Africans enacted the Redeker Plan (more on that later) and the Americans went with Phase One, where special forces appeared to put down pockets of zombies where they turned up. The point was that in the book, though the government didnt know these people were zombies, they knew something was wrong and took preventative steps. The people were also aware of these mystery outbreaks, and that they eventually got out of control. However, in the film Gerry appeared not just shocked when the horde turns up being fair, you would be too but completely baffled as to what they were, as if this million-zombie run just sort of dropped from the sky. For zombies to turn up on this scale, youd have to have known about it for weeks, and weirdly, the national leaders share his amnesia theyre just as surprised when the plague takes Boston, New York and Philadelphia in a matter of hours. By cutting the outbreak stage, the film-makers accidentally opened a big plot hole which looks frankly confusing after a re-watch.