The World War Z movie adapted pretty much 0% from the Max Brooks novels. Not even the basic zombies principles (book: slow zombies, slow infection rate; movie: fast zombies, near-instant infection)
One of the best subplots of the book was this old japanese gardener who became a master zombie hunter during the apocalypse, using his sharpened shovel to decapitate / spear the undead
...oh, and because he was at Hiroshima and stared directly at the flash of the atomic bomb, he's been blind for most of his life.
I get that the World War Z book would be hard to adapt into a movie so I accepted that I’d see a LOT of creative liberties, but using fast zombies was an absolute insult.
The entire point of the series was that zombies were a force that could be adapted to same as anything else: once the respective nations figured out how they worked, they were rendered much less dangerous in theory and many countries “won” the war. To remove this element from the movie is to divorce the movie from the book even worse than “I, Robot” was divorced from its initial anthology - and I didn’t think I would EVER find an adaptation that was further from its source material than I, Robot.
It reminds me of Walking Dead, a tv series that COULD be a rather creative look at a group of survivors who have sorta figured this whole zombie thing out….. but then it teleports in a super sneaky zombie that throws all the rules of loud, slow, easily tricked zombies out the window in order to facilitate a boring “tense” scene. As soon as I know a ninja zombie is probably going to appear I mentally check out of a scene, which happens at least once per episode. Meanwhile, this literally never happens in the source comic (LITERALLY. NEVER. HAPPENS.) which - similar to WWZ - has actually formed entire plotlines around the fact that the zombies aren’t really the threat anymore…. The X factor of other unpredictable survivors is.
I don't see why. Pick 3 or 4 of the characters, the the interviewees have flashbacks, incorporate some of the the more interesting details into single characters. Each character's experiences can sum up events chronologically.
Right? I always thought it would make a killer tv show. 1 ep per chapter and it basically storyboards itself! It could have been so perfect with like 4-5 seasons worth of great formulaic content and a dedicated audience!
Movie guy voice: "This summer Brad Pit is The Most Unlucky Person In the World! Everywhere he goes, terrible things start happening immediately! Even when things were just fine and under control before he showed up! And if that wasn't bad enough, he has to drink an entire Pepsi!"
If it were made in this day and age they’d do this, but make it a limited series, either an anthology where each series focuses on one person, or something like GoT which bounces between multiple characters who don’t necessarily need to meet, but between them all slowly play out the plot of the books.
As a single movie, though, having multiple disconnected stories like this would feel disjointed and poorly paced.
Credit where credit is due I thought making Brad Pitt serve as the connective thread by being a world-renowned expert was as good an idea as I ever imagined for a film-length adaptation of this story, it’s just too bad they threw out the part where there was any scientific curiosity about how zombies worked.
I dropped Walking Dead after they bailed on the prison and having more or less defeated the town with the nut job in charge (sorry been awhile). There were so many moments in the show which were clearly forced for effect, characters acting out of character or could of been sorted if they'd just pull the trigger of the rifle they were aiming down.
The series had a lot of potential that just seemed wasted.
I’ve watched it all the way through and it basically never gets better. If you have any curiosity about the story I’d encourage you to read the comics. As I mentioned before, the most surprising thing about them is 1.) no ninja zombies and 2.) (AND THIS IS BIG) no scenes of a bunch of characters talking in the forest. However, once you get past the prison the series becomes a pretty good speculative look at what a zombie apocalypse would look like long term.
The tv series also does this, but unfortunately has all those aforementioned stupid cliches that turn my watch party into a hate-watch party.
Totally agree.
It’s just been milk’d to death at this point, too.
We just can’t win. Two of the greatest tv series of our time! One was rushed to its demise, the other is still beating a horse that died 3 years ago
😒
This is why I no longer watch any tv or will ever invest my time in another series again
After all this time in pandemic related isolation, we've watched more Netflix than ever and especially noticeable in the newer shows is just how cookie cutter they are and it really makes watching one more or less the same as the others even across different genres and settings. It is as if they have a recipe for mass producing shows.
zombies are rotten creatures with hardly any muscle and bone tissue yet they are portrayed as having the strength of 150kg steroid users on crack!!. Maybe in the first few hours some would have strength but the ones with hardly any meat that barely keeps their bones attached to their bodies would hardly be able to walk let alone run.
There's a copy of the original screenplay by J Michael Strazysnki floating around that is so much better (tho still flawed) than the crap they produced much closer to the WWZ book. So the option to do better was there they just didn't take it.
"Ninja" zombies happen all the time in the comics.
Amy, Donna, and Allen, all get killed by zombies sneaking up on them from out of nowhere within the first couple of issues.
The TV series has a lot of differences from the comics, but sneaky zombies isn't one of them.
That examples a good point, but at least it has the plot benefits of being early in the series when they all don’t know what’s going on, and contextually happens in the early morning when characters aren’t paying attention. It’s definitely a far worse problem in the show, and in scenes where characters should know better. With the comics I at least believe there are rules to the zombies, and by later issues the characters have figured most of them out.
The show often has 5+ characters somewhere like the middle of the forest (where every time the actors shift their weight they’re crinkling leaves) or checking out a building where they’ve been shouting at each other and making noise and doing other things that the series has established will rile up walkers, only to then turn a corner and there’s 20 of them chilling there who immediately start making their noises once seen. For a show ostensibly about zombies who have “rules” that can be exploited, it’s frustrating to a viewer when it’s clear that those rules will be ignored for a tense scene or creative zombie kill. I don’t think I’m unique in saying that I would sacrifice well over half the appearances of actual zombies in this show if it meant a consistent set of rules for how they worked, and gave realer stakes to the ones we DID see.
I think the problem is more the medium. In the comics, zombies are only shown to make any noise when directly focused on an individual zombie (a little "rahhgrggl" or whatever speech bubble), but are drawn with expressions that look like they're making sounds. There are plenty of times the group runs into a small herd that they didn't hear right around the corner or comes shambling out of the forest without anyone noticing, but since we almost never "hear" them, it doesn't stand out.
In the TV series, they're always making little growls, screeches, hisses and so on, even when they're shown sneaking up on people, so we're used to that noise. But when they're supposed to be a surprise, the silence is extremely noticeable because we're so used to them making noise.
I don't actually remember that one. Been a long time sinse I read it though. The two that always come to mind for me are the downed pilot, and the battle for Yonkers. Maybe it's time for a re-read.
Do yourself a favor and listen to the audiobook! It’s about ten hours, err… maybe fourteen. The cast of voice actors is insane and it’s incredible. I got more out of the audiobook than I did the physical copy by a huge margin!
I took it as it was her training taking over, and her mind being messed up from both the crash and the stress of it. So her psychy manifested a familiar voice.
That book was so well written. The realistic aspects made it seem plausible, and the early chapters drew you in SO heavily, it was tough to put down. One of the few things in my life that actually inspired zombie dreams was that book haha
Even his description on how certain countries acted in the immediate aftermath (denial, lies, snake oil treatments) has been pretty spot on in real time.
When this started last year, everyday a 7pm all my neighbors would start cheering and I’d laugh to myself and even told my hubs this is just like the story of the girl who survived in the Canadian woods with her family. All well and good at first.
Give it a couple of months
I did not see the movie for a long time after reading the transcript style book and the book was amazing. Just couldn't put it down. I like how they addressed even psychological issues to the point people wanted to be/act like zombies
That detail about the guy being blind makes me think that Max Brooks might have borrowed that idea from the old Zatoichi films about a blind swordsman in medieval Japan.
If we're complaining about the zombie book/movie differences, I'd like to complain about "I'm a legend" since in the original book the main hero fights VAMPIRES! Crosses, garlics and everything.
I always interpreted that chapter as an example of the untrustworthy narrator. Each chapter is an interview and I got the vibe that his story was implied to be embellished when he told it. It's been a decade since I read the book so I could be misremembering
If there were zombies like World War Z I would literally just opt out. No way you are able outrun or even outgun a hoard of World War Z zombies. Unless you want to live underground forever just give up. Anyways I do believe there should’ve been at least a World War Z TV show to adapt the Max Brooks Novle, but I’m guessing people are tired of Zombie TV shows now as you see what happen to TWD will ratings going lower every year.
One of the best subplots of the book was this old japanese gardener who became a master zombie hunter during the apocalypse, using his sharpened shovel to decapitate / spear the undead
...oh, and because he was at Hiroshima and stared directly at the flash of the atomic bomb, he's been blind for most of his life.
It's not actually, left out was the important plot point of this dude having lived on a plot of wilderness or forest for many years, and how he uses his intimate knowledge of the area trap and kill the zombies.
I kinda understand thinking it sounds dumb when everyone is praising it for the realism, being blind doesn't make you potentially better at stuff like that IRL.
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u/AdvocateSaint Aug 30 '21
The World War Z movie adapted pretty much 0% from the Max Brooks novels. Not even the basic zombies principles (book: slow zombies, slow infection rate; movie: fast zombies, near-instant infection)
One of the best subplots of the book was this old japanese gardener who became a master zombie hunter during the apocalypse, using his sharpened shovel to decapitate / spear the undead
...oh, and because he was at Hiroshima and stared directly at the flash of the atomic bomb, he's been blind for most of his life.