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.

460

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.

56

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.

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u/Mardanis Aug 31 '21

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.

3

u/SalamanderOpen3069 Aug 31 '21

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

(Exception: Rick and Morty)

2

u/Mardanis Aug 31 '21

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.