Could you guys make sense of the initial reaction of the two guys he first met at the W.H.O. lab in Cardiff? They seemed to know something about who he was, and said “You know how this must look to us,” and seemed to think it more than possible that he was a threat. I couldn’t figure out how any of that was supposed to work. Was I missing something?
(Not that there was much to miss in this execrable flick… How it got generally better reviews than Man of Steel I will never understand. The pretty-cool imagery of masses of undead becoming basically an intelligent fluid through emergent behavior was literally the only thing this movie had going for it. And all of that showed up in the trailer.)
Miracle cure. Turns out the zombies ignore people who are terminally ill.
Yep.
So the first idea is they make soldiers terminally ill then cure them after the fight. Also, as explained at the very end of the film, they end up figuring out how to engineer a general vaccine that doesn’t actually make you ill.
I haven’t seen the movie, Frylock. But Russia and India both were important stories in the book. So probably it’s an editing change of some sort, hard to tell.
There was no Miracle Cure in the book. Although the zombie plague has been contained, there are still zombies out there. One learns not to go into water that hasn’t been screened, or into places that have not been cleared. “White Zone” is the term for areas that are still zombie-ridden(Iceland is supposed to be the worst)
Zombies freeze in winter, so if you live in an area that gets cold enough, you have some breathing space. North America is officially “clear”, but one is still careful, you can’t comb every cave, tunnel, lake and such in just ten years. People live as if they could come back at any time.
I think one highly successful zombie TV show makes a second zombie TV show more likely, not less. Plus, if the movie is successful, there might be enough demand for a TV show. And the TV show doesn’t have to be any more faithful to the movie, than the movie was to the book.
I have read the book. Thought it was ok, but then I’m not a huge fan of the entire Zombie thing. WWZ was especially heavy on the “it’s magic!” to the point where I couldn’t suspend disbelief and just had to go with “Meh, it’s ludicrously impossible and unbelievable, but whatever.”
The film has some wonderfully tense moments and some mind-boggling visual effects. It’s a very effective horror/action flick. Nevertheless, you should not approach this flick with a fully functional three digit IQ and expect to enjoy it.
This is what’s bugged me about both the book and the movie.
The global disaster is supposed to be due to a biological agent, i.e. a virus or bacterium, and yet a biological agent can’t grant a dispensation from simple, basic principles of physics, biochemistry and physiology. Yet their physiology is such that five or six heavy slugs from an automatic weapon won’t keep them down, they seem completely immune from fatigue, they don’t decay or become diseased despite their badly compromised or completely neutralized immune systems, they don’t seem to need water, they seem to feed only on healthy human flesh the supply of which would be completely inadequate for their vast numbers, and their metabolisms operate at such a high level that they can respond immediately with great speed and strength without any obvious energy input sufficient to sustain such a high level of energy output. In the book, the zombies seemed to be exempt not only from basic principles of biochemistry and physiology, they seemed to be exempt from basic principles of chemistry and physics, i.e. they could walk on the ocean bottom at depths that ought to crush them like egg shells, and revived from being frozen at sub-zero temperatures despite the fact that ice crystals bursting the membranes of their cells should have completely disrupted their metabolism.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed both the book and the film. But World War Z, both book and film, are definitely cases where you should just check your brain at the box office and pick it up on your way out. It ain’t Ingmar Bergman. Just enjoy the ride.
I don’t know; that he was some kind of terrorist, coming to terrorize them or steal their deadly bugs or something?
I guess the ending was somewhere between “Miracle Cure” and “Humans have a fighting chance.” The zombies are still there, they haven’t been fixed or wiped out or anything; the humans just have a bit of breathing space to work on figuring out what to do next to not go extinct as a species.
Just one thing there, no one hired Pitt. He bid on the rights himself. It was his baby (and his production company).
For me? I find I quite liked it tonight. It wasn’t a real WWZ book, but I think the globe-hopping search for answers was well done and let us see a lot of what was happening in the world and it was tense and well done.
One thing, though…
The Israeli Army would never be foolish enough to not keep a perimeter guard. Not one chance in hell would those zombies have done their tower of terror thing and gotten away with it.
It was good fun, but for a movie that attempts to tackle a global invasion and convey that sense of scale and awe, it still didn’t touch Independence Day - which is pretty shameful given that ID4 is cheesy and old. I really admire when flicks try to convey global catastrophes and invasions, and the budget gets my hopes up, but no dice.
I was looking for the Saving Private Ryan beach landing of zombie battles, and instead the film opted for a series of Jason Bourne type set piece chases.
I wondered about that, too (we can probably do away with the spoilers now that the movie is out in general release). I guess we were supposed to assume that they thought there walls were high enough to be un-breachable, but with the belt-and-suspenders approach of the Israelis, they definitely would have been watching those walls.
No, it seemed to miss out on conveying just how bad things got, in a very short time. We got a few glimpses of red hot spots in the background occasionally, but we needed a few more scenes to establish the scope of all this.
As a mild point of order, I would note that it’s made quite clear in the book that the zombies do not have a metabolism, and as such complaining that their metabolism doesn’t make any sense isn’t really a valid complaint. They don’t derive nutrition from eating human flesh, because they’re dead and can’t digest food - the consumed flesh just rots in their stomach or sluices out the other end of their digestive tract.
How they do function is something the book doesn’t address - but then again, the text of the book itself is an in-universe document written from the perspective of people who admit they have no idea how zombie physiology works, as they’ve been a bit busy the last 20 years trying to not get eaten and haven’t had time to conduct a full survey of zombie biology.
True. But I think zombies have reached critical mass in popular fiction. They’re now like vampires or superheroes or faster-than-light starships - an author is just free to use them without acknowledging their impossibility.
Well the film is neither like the book, interesting, or good. It’s just an obnoxious vanity project with the name, and a few borrowed plot points. Even as a generic zombie movie it sucks big time.
I thought this was a pretty good zombie flick. On its own merits, the zombies were creepier and the effects were better than most.
However, as a huge fan of the book, I was enormously disappointed in the relatively small scope and style of the film. Maybe I had my hopes up too much, but this was a zombie movie with the name WWZ plastered onto the front that had little, if anything, to do with the book! WTF were you thinking Brad?!? If you wanted to make a zombie movie, then make one, but don’t ruin the best zombie book ever written for your vanity project!
The list of disappointments looms long and wide. The miracle cure, the stupid pointless family, the point of view of being in the start and middle of the war instead of a retrospective from afterwards, the pointless little changes like North Korea pulling teeth instead of securing their entire population in tunnels and patient zero being in India instead of China, no fucking Yonkers (this was THE big moment in the book where the humans realized they were in deep shit, you could have Michael Bay’d the hell out of that battle!!), no Paul Redeker, Israel being overrun…its like someone went out specifically to NOT make this like the book. What’s the point when there are so many changes?
All in all, this made me really appreciate the book even more, I’m going to reread it again this week because of this movie. At least I’ll always have my imagination. I just wish I hadn’t been hyped and looking forward to this movie for the past year and a half. God damn it, what a waste of a great source material…:smack:
I didn’t get that either. I said out loud during the scene “what, do you think he’s a spy for the zombies?”
I found the movie to generally be mindless fun. The solution was ridiculous, and was depicted in a ridiculous way, but I wasn’t expecting it to be more than a fun action flick so I didn’t care. The scene that scared me the most was when the side mirror got knocked off lol. I did find Brad’s former occupation with the UN to be an intriguing idea.
I wanted there to be a scene where Gerry gets back to A-Wing, having casually walked past a zombie throng.
Scientist: Great, you made it! Now let’s see what you injected yourself with…[checks bottle] What the…* herpes?!*
Then in order to save humanity, everyone has to have sex with Brad Pitt.
I felt the book was basically unfilmable but this was a a good attempt at capturing the spirit of it at least and was a pretty good movie. I just don’t think “Fast Zombies” feel like Zombies. They should call them something else. They are a different kind of monster.