Con: Uninteresting Supporting Characters
There's a scene in JJ Abrams's
Super 8 where Charles explains to Joe why he wrote a love interest for the hero in his short film. Charles says that giving the main character a wife makes it easier for the audience to care about what happens because you want to see the two of them get back together.
That's all I could think of whenever Gerry's family was on-screen (coincidentally,
World War Z and Charles's short film in
Super 8 revolve around a man investigating a zombie outbreak. Go figure). They seemed to exist for the sole purpose of making the movie more emotionally engaging. Outside of that, they didn't so much of anything. They weren't critical to the overall story. But
World War Z has a bigger problem that goes beyond Gerry's family. There isn't a single interesting supporting character in the entire movie. It's a pity because a lot of films feature side characters that steal the show and become just as memorable as the main character (see: Joker, The; Candie, Calvin; Eklund, Dickie; DeVito, Tommy; Landa, Hans; Kyle, Selina). Populating your movie with a whole cast of great characters - and not just one main one - helps elevate your film and make it special. Pitt's supporting players are essentially walking plot devices. Gerry's friend Thierry is there to set the plot in motion. The soldier Segen is there to help Gerry discover the cure. Other characters Gerry meets throughout the film spout exposition-heavy dialogue and then leave. Outside of Gerry, nobody is given anything interesting to do, which is disappointing. He's the only character with anything resembling an arc. Since they threw the source material out the window, maybe they could have given Gerry a sidekick character that teams up with him and goes through his own changes. Maybe his wife could have been a doctor and helped people in a lab develop a cure (weak example, I know...). I just wish Gerry wasn't the only memorable character from
World War Z. There won't be any Best Supporting Actor nominations here.