World War Z - the movie

[Healergirl]

I just saw the trailer.

The fast Zombies are annoying - the book used slow Romero zombies.  But that isn't a deal breaker so far as me seeing the movie goes.

Casting Brad Pitt in the lead doesn't bother me, he is a fine actor.

The focus on his character bothers me.  The movie seems to start off with a bang.  That bothers me.

It appears that Hollywood has turned the book into a standard Zombie Apocalypse movie by taking out the elements of the book that made that book stand out from the rest:

The slow build up to the impending holocaust.

The multiple points of view telling different aspects of the story - to be fair, to do the story justice an ensemble-cast miniseries would be required.

The large portion of the book dealing with the aftermath, life in the wake of the storm.

The way the book was written is just not how Hollywood tells a story.  Hollywood is almost as formalized as Kabuki theater in the way it approaches telling a tale.  Maybe not "almost", either.

Will the movie be a spectacle?  Yes,  I have no doubt.

Will it be fun to watch?  Hey, a movie where humans win?  You bet it will be fun.

Will it be different, a breath of fresh air the way the book is?

No.

Your Mileage May Vary, of course.

[Koren]

I have my doubts on it as well for similar reasons.

Its the same reason I would be worried if they ever made a movie of the book The Passage by Justin Cronin. Hollywood has morph into movement over story and sometimes that just isnt needed. I feel it might be a bit of the same with this, and its easier to show fast movement focusing on one character then multiple

[Healergirl]

WWZ is almost tailor made for the old style big budget ensemble cast disaster movie of the type Hollywood did very well back in the seventies and early eighties.

But that is not how Hollywoood works these days.

I very much fear that Brad Pitt's character will somehow be responsible for rolling back the hordes.

Whereas in the book... it was a war.  Everybody, humanity itself defeated the Zombies, not humanity's heroic representative.

This is nothing against Pitt! He is a superb actor, and if he invited me back to his place after dinner my safeword would fly right out of my head.

[Shjade]

There's always the (slim) possibility that there won't be any "rolling back the hordes."

We didn't win World War Z, after all. Zed did.

[RubySlippers]

Zombies run in this, I will not waste my time seeing this then. Zombies should not run in a zombie movie!

[Healergirl]

Shjade,

Um... humanity did  in fact win.  The zombies are still around, they will never go away, but they are a nuisance, not an existential threat.  Interviews with people taking aprt in the continuing search and destroy prgrames are  part of the aftermath, after all.

Rubyslipers,

I understand you completely.  The running zombies... uggh.  Fast Zombies re a contamination of th genre by 28 Days later.  A splendid movie, but fast is for mind addled living zombies, not undead zombies.

[Beguile's Mistress]

WWZ is almost tailor made for the old style big budget ensemble cast disaster movie of the type Hollywood did very well back in the seventies and early eighties.

But that is not how Hollywoood works these days.

Investing less and grossing more is their goal.

[Healergirl]

 eguile's Mistress,

True, but investing less?   Sooner or later you hit diminishing returns.  And how the money is invested is important.  Will WWZ gross more with a lot of money going to Brad Pitt instead of the same money going to a lesser known ensemble cast?  Quite possibly.  Going for the big star is safer, so that is the way Hollywood is doing it.

[Shjade]

Shjade,

Um... humanity did  in fact win.  The zombies are still around, they will never go away, but they are a nuisance, not an existential threat.  Interviews with people taking aprt in the continuing search and destroy prgrames are  part of the aftermath, after all.

Humanity survived. They didn't win unless you call a 90+% global population loss "winning."

We lost. World War Z is interviewing the survivors in the aftermath, the people picking up the pieces.

[Healergirl]

Shjade,

Your position is not difficult to defend... but no, in that kind of fight, losing is extinction.  Winning is species survival.

Being almost wiped out as opposed to being even more closely to almost wiped out is still a vcitory in that kind of struggle.  It give new depth to the term Pyrrhic Victory, but it is still a win.

[TheGlyphstone]

Humanity, and more importantly, society survived. That's the key feature of the traditional zombie genre, breakdown of the social order and the zombie hordes eating everyone...maybe isolated pockets of humanity survive, but civilization is gone.

In WWZ, civilization wins. Humanity gets the crap kicked out of it, but it survives, and thus wins.

[Healergirl]

The Glyphstone,

Very well put, I wish I had thought to express it that way!

I have a Zombie Apocalypse Aftremath game in planning stages - GMing is a drug (grin)  I am thinking out loud here:

https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=163851.0

[Question Mark]

@Healer: Couldn't agree more, although I'm a bit tougher on their betraying of the book's themes and style.  Yes, it's just a trailer, and yes it's probably too early to make hard line judgements.  But I remember hearing that they were making WWZ into a movie, and I was fucking pumped for it!  I loved the book; I thought it was a brilliantly new take on the genre.  And then the trailer was nothing but a huge disappointment.  Aside from zombies and the fact that it takes place in modern day, it bears no resemblance to World War Z.  Where's the international world-wide perspective?  The slow societal decay as governments fall, and humans are forced to take the impending apocalypse seriously?  The retrospective interviews of grim survivors?  The realistic perspective?

Why is Brad Pitt some kind of heroic badass?  What happened to the historian/interviewer Max Brooks?  Why are the zombies running?  How the hell did a huge swarm of them get into central Manhattan without anybody noticing?

Most importantly, why does this take place during the war, and not ten years after it?

Maybe I'm wrong, but from that trailer, I don't think I am.


@Shjade: I can certainly see your point.  But I got to side with Healer on this one.  Humanity (mostly) kept its cool despite being nearly overwhelmed.  They got their shit together, implemented the Redeker (sp?) plan, and took the planet back.  By the end of the book, the zombies are being systematically exterminated.  If they make a comeback, it won't be for hundreds of years, long enough for the lessons humanity learned in the War Z to be forgotten.

Of course, we could get down to semantics and debate what victory actually means.  Ya, our population was depleted, our infrastructure ravaged, borders shattered and cities burned.  But in a zombie apocalypse, victory simply means survival.  Otherwise, it wouldn't be an apocalypse.  If we can survive the end of the world, I'd say that deserves a cigar.

[Healergirl]

Question Mark,

I understand your reservations totally!  But if I pay to see the movie I am putting a little bit of money in Max Brook's pocket  (I referred to him as Abrams, earlier, rrr, sorry!)  It is not his fault what Hollywood has done to his story - I have acquaintances in show biz, they tell me this sort of thing is very very much the rule.

Zombie Survival Guide was a hoot to read,  WWZ was grimly satisfying.  I want to see more from him.

[TheGlyphstone]

Is Max Brooks receiving royalties/a percentage of the profits? I thought the general practice was buying the rights to a property for a flat fee.

[Healergirl]

TheGlypphStone,

A good question.  Depends on how good his agent is.  Payment op front plus "Gross points" is the smart way to do it, and his book  was/is a hot property, taht might have given his agent the leverage.  But I don't know.  But the better the movie does, the more status he gets with his publishres, so that is one more pebble on the side of the scale in favor of seeing it in the theater.

[TheGlyphstone]

It was mainly an idle question, because you'd said seeing the movie puts a bit of money in his pocket, which would depend on if he'd gotten a gross profit agreement or not.

For me, it's the balance of giving Brooks that little bit of popularity cred with publishers against not wanting to encourage Hollywood to butcher popular titles like this.

[Healergirl]

TGS,

I hear you.  That is not a difficult position to defend.  But Hollywood will change only with great slowness, they make too much money off of people who don't care like we care.   And the "we" changes with book to book.  Oh well.

[RubySlippers]

Shjade,

Um... humanity did  in fact win.  The zombies are still around, they will never go away, but they are a nuisance, not an existential threat.  Interviews with people taking aprt in the continuing search and destroy prgrames are  part of the aftermath, after all.

Rubyslipers,

I understand you completely.  The running zombies... uggh.  Fast Zombies re a contamination of th genre by 28 Days later.  A splendid movie, but fast is for mind addled living zombies, not undead zombies.

I watched a documentary the Truth About Zombies but experts in deadly diseases did make a good point of the "virus zombie" in any form and that is this: even the most vicious diseases known natural or manmade can kill in less than two days in a normal human being (not sick or with say a weakened immune system). That is more than enough time for any government to act and deal with the threat. And that is if this is an airborne disease if it takes bites its far less likely to spread as fast.

Seems to me the only force that could raise the number of dead to be an issue is a space radiation like in the original Romero movies that animates all recently dead but even then most nations have enough military power to stop the spread of the living dead.

What I would like to see in a movie would be an alien threat maybe a nanite virus that infects and replicates fast enough and places the body into a dead zombie walker state, that for me would make sense as a rational person. It could be an alien death probe sent to take out a threat now that would be cool and likely could spread faster since it would not be a normal disease.

[Healergirl]

nanites are a nifty ide, an alien attack is just about the only way to have Non-magic zombies.

[TheGlyphstone]

nanites are a nifty ide, an alien attack is just about the only way to have Non-magic zombies.

Not necessary aliens - via Clarke's Third Law, that's basically magical zombies inside a different wrapper. There are some very weird types of parasites out there that can influence their host creature's behavior and activity, though, that could be made even weirder with a healthy dose of SCIENCE. I wouldn't discount as impossible a story about a genetically engineered parasite of some sort with the ability to co-opt a human's nervous system. Obviously there's still a lot of detail that needs to be filled in, but it'd be a start to a science-based zombie that humans could theoretically make themselves.

[Healergirl]

Theglyphstone,

Certainly!  Lots of precedence in nature.  However, those are living mind addled zombies, not the living dead.  Mind addled zombies, that's esy to do with Sciene.  28 Days Later, The Crazies, Zombie Town - which directly used the parasites idea.  jjust to name three examples.  My Willing Suspension Of Disbelief has no  trouble with that. 

But when  dead bodies re coming to life?  Sorry.  Death is a binary state, but it is not a simple process metabolically speaking.  A virus is commanding a dead body to get up and walk?  I just commanded my lukewarm tea to heat itself. Just about the same effect.   Now I can ut my tea in the microwave,a nd i have.  but that is an input of energy to the system from an external source.  A dead body is not generating energy, that is part of what makes it dead.  An important part.

[TheGlyphstone]

That's why I specified it'd take genetic (and biological) tinkering, using knowledge more advanced that we have access to currently. A (probably microscopic) parasite that infests a corpse and 'animates' it by breaking down and consuming the corpse itself for fuel/energy, a deliberate and highly accelerated rotting process that produces enough metabolic energy for the parasite to multiply and 'move' its host. They'd only be animate for as long as there was enough body tissue to consume, which would probably be a short period. Science fiction, yes, but at least loosely plausible.

If you could engineer such a parasite, it'd result in something that acted a lot like a Romero shambler. The body would be animate, but slow, clumsy, and jerky - a non-sentient parasite won't break down the host body in any predictable or logical order, so it might end up causing the muscles to decay faster than the internal organs. It obviously wouldn't be able to speak, or use tools/doors, or anything related to manual dexterity. It'd seek to engage in physical contact with live 'prey' - not to physically eat flesh or brains, but simply exposing the new host to fluids laden with immature parasites.

[Healergirl]

A parasite consuming the host body is a wonderful idea!  And if said parasite wasn't worried about maintinging human body temperature, it could last corresondingly longer before the host body was consumed to uselessness.

[TheGlyphstone]

It might co-opt other bodily systems too, if it already hijacks the sensory organs to navigate - a particular fluctuation of the vocal cord muscles to produce the distinctive Romero Moan. It's not deliberately communicating, but it's been programmed to create this sound when in pursuit of prey, and also to react to hearing said sound as an indicator of nearby prey.

....We're really off-topic, aren't we? This should probably be in your other zombie thread.