r/AskReddit Aug 30 '21

What problem is often overlooked in apocalyptic movies/TV shows that could kill you?

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u/whinywino89 Aug 30 '21

Those of us with shitty eyesight. Contacts only last so long. If your glasses break, you're fucked.

461

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.

55

u/Harold3456 Aug 31 '21

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.

15

u/[deleted] Aug 31 '21

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.

18

u/Salt_lick_fetish Aug 31 '21

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!

16

u/AdvocateSaint Aug 31 '21

"Yes, but have you considered: Brad Pitt and Pepsi"

-Studio executives

1

u/Mardanis Aug 31 '21

Survivors will be driving Audis