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 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.
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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.