Generation Z takes place some time after a zombie outbreak. The world lost two billion people, but managed to survive. The Rezort is an island where people pay for the experience of killing zombies in a safe environment. Melanie (Jessica de Gouw) has come to the island with her boyfriend Lewis (Martin McCann), hoping to deal with some emotional issues stemming from what she went through during the outbreak. Unfortunately, while there, a computer virus shuts down the security systems on the Rezort, letting the zombies run free. Millie and her group have to trek across the zombie-infested island before the entire place is bombed into oblivion.
The movie has pretenses of being more than just a story about people killing a mindless force of monsters. Represented in this film is a theoretical ethical question about killing the already dead. At one point, a character opines that this kind of behavior was some sort of slippery slope; that if we can treat the dead this way, it can’t be long before we start doing horrible things to the living. And in fact, the plot does play that out, revealing in the end that there might be more to the Rezort than people might think.
It’s an intriguing idea, but it doesn’t hold up. The film presents a scenario that requires the entire world to be completely blind to a basic numerical impossibility. And in the end, as much as the movie seems to present a case against the indiscriminate killing of the zombies, the main bulk of the story is basically the indiscriminate killing of zombies. In short, the movie has its cake and eats it, too. It still clings to the basic thrills of the violence that comes with this genre of film, all while poo-pooing the very concept of enjoying the said violence.
It doesn’t work very well as a zombie movie, either. It takes the modern tack of having these zombies be incongruously quick, and gives them the inexplicable ability to sneak up on people. Whenever the zombies are on screen, they’re constantly making groaning noises and treading heavily on the terrain. But offscreen, they are like the ninja, apparently lurking just inches from our characters, invisible as the wind. Yet again, this is a movie that doesn’t seem to really understand what it is that actually makes these monsters scary.
The direction as a whole is lackluster. The movie is largely made up of flatly lit frames. The action sequences are incoherent and confusing, the geography of the scenes never made clear. In the lead role, Jessica de Gouw struggles with an ill defined trauma, the actress looking unsure of what she’s supposed to be feeling at any given moment. Martin McCann is no help as her bland leading man. Dougray Scott shows up as a grizzled veteran, and mainly growls his way to a paycheck.
There is a good idea at the heart of Generation Z. There is certainly merit in thinking about the psychological toll that violence takes on humanity as a whole, on what it is that witnessing the horrors of war does to us. But the film just doesn’t think it through. It doesn’t study all the angles, and it ends presenting a story that doesn’t really seem to know what it is saying. It fumbles through its themes, and ends up contradicting itself on the way to a horribly underwhelming ending that just seems to ignore everything that went on before.
My Rating:
