I just got back from watching this movie.
@2:43, Jeremy Jaws complains that the movie would have been the same without Brad Pitt's ("Gerry's") family. That's true, but it's a weak point. Without a family values theme, there would be no apocalypse movie to complain about.
Does anybody here remember a black-and-white movie called "Panic in the Year Zero" (1962; Ray Milland, Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon)? It's about a civilized father, who probably never used a weapon in his life, forced to violently defend his family in post-nuclear war America.
THEY ALL INVOLVE THIS FAMILY VALUES THEME.
Jeremy Jaws's real complaint would better concern the vacuousness of this movie. The father in "Panic" was forced to choose between civilized behavior and savagery in order to defend his family. The father in "Panic" was great in showing the contrast between civilization and savagery. The star of "WWZ" had no difficult values choice to make. And he was already a warrior type, not a weakling father forced by circumstances into an opposite role. There is no interesting contrast to make. There is no values statement in this movie.
The REAL glitch in the movie involved the decision to send "Gerry" to South Korea in order to determine how the zombie plague started, thus figure out how to defeat it. That's like sending someone to Africa to figure out how to defeat HIV.
I did enjoy both the book (which I read a year ago) and the movie. The movie had some interesting takes on the zombie apocalypse theme totally missed by its author Max Brooks. One of those involves a question I asked after I read the book: why do all zombies have teeth? Not everybody in reality has teeth. Apparently, the North Koreans (in the movie) were reading my mind and figured out their own novel way to defeat the zombies.