World War Z
While I'm not a rabid, brain-eating fan of the zombie apocalypse genre, I've enjoyed zombie films before (most recently the ZomRomCom Warm Bodies) and the trailers for World War Z had me excited for the movie. That scene with the zombies acting like ants, climbing on each other to scale a wall, was delightfully disturbing.
Well, if World War Z has a fault, it's those trailers, and I can only tell you why it's a fault by offering up a bit of a spoiler.
SPOILER ALERT: all of the big action moments in the film are covered in the trailers. The zombie ants, the commercial flight, the helicopter, the rooftop, the streets of Philly... all there. Sure, there's more to those scenes, and you don't get the whole story from them, but the trailer is very much a set of storyboard chapter headings.
Fortunately, the trailer's storyboarding won't take you all the way to the end of the movie the way Fast & Furious 6's trailer did. The final act is almost completely absent from the trailers, and this is really refreshing. Unfortunately (maybe, depending on your tastes) the final act doesn't have any of those big action moments. It's tense and exciting and scary and hopefully heroic, but nothing explodes. So, yeah, I'm whining a bit.
I haven't read the book, but I've been assured that the movie is its own creature. Don't go see the film expecting the book to be brought to life on the big screen. Go see the film because you want to see a good zombie apocalypse film with some new zombie behavior, and the fresh horrors that behavior provides. Also, enjoy a movie that lets you mourn the loss of millions (upon hundreds of millions, maybe billions) of people in a personal sort of way. This isn't the faux grimdark, disaster-porn that Man of Steel provided. This is the real deal.
Did I have fun? Yes. Yes I did. I don't like being tense, I don't like being startled, and I resent a trailer that telegraphs the big punches, but I enjoyed myself anyway. World War Z comes in at number 6 for me this year (where it can cuddle up to Warm Bodies, which seems fitting.)