Some did, some didn’t. Pvt Waino described some folks cheered like liberated Netherlands at the arrival of the army. Some were accusing: “You abandoned us!” And others fought the army. The army had special units to deal with the last group. Units with tanks.
Saw a recent review that stated karaoke killed Jerusalem. (But now that I think about it, it was definitely a reverse Walls of Jericho situation, wasn’t it?)
I saw this today and haven’t read the thread but here are my initial impressions. It wasn’t the book, but I enjoyed parts of this movie.
What I didn’t like:
I didn’t like The Guy Who Saves The World. The whole point of the book was that life as we know it is completely over. It takes some time to even establish safe places and months or years to build an offensive force and start trying to clear ourselves of this plague. Even the decision to fight back was a monumental one, and there was no cloak of invisibility.
I didn’t like the way that every time he was running for his life, he was looking over his shoulder and solving the puzzle. He apparently can’t run while looking forward. The very first time he saw a zombie bite someone, he was looking over his shoulder while running with his family and counting how long until they turned. How did he know they were going to turn? How could he possibly think to do that? He somehow surmised everything that was happening while trying to get his kids out of a wrecked car and run to safety.
For this being a movie that supposedly dealt with the global aspect, it didn’t.
Did I miss something about the nuke? I only saw it for like 4 seconds. From what I can tell, the only effect of the nuke was to interrupt one phone call.
And yeah, there wasn’t even a security camera on the walls in Israel?
Fast zombies. I don’t like them. They’re just too energetic. In the book, zombies could ramp up because they just keep ambling forward. A few fall and the next zombies just walk/crawl over them. You don’t get a steep pyramid, you get a long ramp. It’s pretty logical. But fast zombies climbing on top of each other at breakneck speed isn’t. They’re so energetic and moving so much, no one zombie would be able to keep their footing long enough to make any progress upward.
Those weird barking noises they made reminded me of the raptors calling each other in Jurassic Park.
The ridiculous plane crash. And this plane had just landed in Israel, we’re supposed to believe a zombie was hiding quietly in the bathroom for hours?
It ended with a freeze frame. This is 2013. A freeze frame?
What I did enjoy:
The action started early and was pretty good. The two motorcycle cops about 5 minutes in, the escape from traffic, the pharmacy, the apartments, the escape from Israel, chopping off the hand, the plane. I liked the plane outbreak action, the shooting and the grenade, but the surprise zombie and the crash was still stupid.
Some deaths were cliche and some weren’t. The special forces guy that gave Pitt his ring should have been named Captain Cliche. (I wonder what Pitt did with that ring?) On the other hand, the guy in charge at the WHO actually surviving and the hotshot doctor dying from an accident were not expected.
It was an ok movie. The story wasn’t great but the action was mostly good and some was pretty intense.
Sorry purists, but seriously, if a movie is trying to reflect the “real” world and there’s an infection that causes the dead to walk or RUN, they’re going to be called “zombies.” Let’s say for our purposes that tomorrow, in real life, there’s a report on CNN that somewhere in India a person who had died has come back to life and is able to run really fast. Do you think the editorial board of CNN is going to say “Hmm… they say he’s undead, but he’s fast… we really can’t call him a ‘zombie’.” No, the media is going to pick up on him being undead and regardless of speed will post the headline “ZOMBIE REPORTED IN INDIA.” And then everyone else will pick up on it. So when the movie refers to them as zombies, guess what, that’s reflecting what people in real life would call them. They’re not going to worry if it’s canon. So, yeah, calling them “zombies” adds verisimilitude.
Just saw the movie, and as a huge fan of the book, I can honestly say that those of you who were claiming that this movie was nothing like the book or completely unfaithful to it are completely mistaken and are missing the point of the book.
The whole point of World War Z was to explore the world-wide phenomenon, investigate it, and build a narrative of how it spread, how it affected world populations, governments etc. And that’s pretty much exactly what the movie did as well. The form, of course, was very different, but the basic story that the movie and the book told was the same.
There was precious little other than the “vaccine” that directly contradicted the book, and I feel like it captured the spirit of it extremely well. I was impressed at how good of a movie it was, pretty much, on all merits. And I like that the solution at the end of the movie wasn’t just a magic cure-all. It was just a way to help them continue to effectively fight and survive, basically what they ended up having to do at the end of the book (but without the aid of the biological camouflage).
I was a huge fan of the book and am a huge fan of the movie. I thought it was a success at capturing the spirit of the book, and I feel like it successfully translated a basically unfilmable book into a great movie about a world wide war against zombies.
There were some fun set pieces in this (the airplane scene, the fall of Jersualem, Philadelphia), but overall it was a very disappointing, weak remake of “28 Days Later.” NOTHING to do with the book, and I really don’t know why: as others have said, they could have done it documentary style, or done interlocking storylines. Why would they take a very popular book and throw out all of the plot?
One question: during the initial outbreak in Philadelphia there was a shot of a city street and suddenly a fireball bursts sideways out of a building, causing people to run in panic. Okay, so it’s a pretty common movie shot, but my mind IMMEDIATELY went to the Boston marathon bombing. Anyone else? The composition of the shot was just so close to the video footage we’ve all seen. Any chance that was intentional?
The Boston bombing was barely two months ago. Were they still filming the movie at that time?
No, that would have been filmed long before Boston. Though they may have had some discussion as to whether it should stay in the movie.
What I wondered is what could have been caused to explode.
That was the whole point of his character, the reason he ended up put in the middle of trying to find a solution. That his experience and temperament is such that he doesn’t panic, doesn’t stop watching, can survive in bad places.
He didn’t. He didn’t count, he didn’t know what was going to happen. His daughter’s toy was counting (it was a toy, I think, that plays hide-and-seek and when she dropped it and he picked it up it triggered the toy counting out loud).
So he wasn’t figuring everything out while it was happening. He was observing everything and remembered it later to piece together the clues.
I thought the count was from some train announcing it’s arrival at a nearby station. (I don’t know *why *a train announcement would count the seconds as it arrives, but that’s what it sounded like.) I know I heard the words “…arriving at the platform” before the count started.
No, I thought it was from a toy. (The train station is not that close to the scene IIRC, at least not in real life.)
Thought this wasn’t bad. Someone tried making a more true to the novel World War Z, Ken Burns Style. Here.
Yeah, I thought maybe it was added last minute in post-production. But, maybe not. Still, even if it was an accident the association came immediately to my mind, which made that whole scene all the more frightening.
I liked it as a Roland Emmerich-style dumb summer action movie–lots of people running around getting killed and things blowing up. When the movie first starts and the title graphics begin to roll, I think they provide a better name for it: Plan B.
It was left vague because it was just the first clue. I think it was supposed to be undiagnosed bone cancer.
The zeke was not in the bathroom. That was the elevator to the below deck storage. I assumed one got into the wheel well while it was taxiing or the pilots were figuring out where to go.
I would have loved to see that chihuahua picking his way through the wreckage after the plane crash.
Eyebrows 0f Doom and Siam Sam are both right: the girl’s toy was counting down the arrival of a train.
And as I recall of the fall-of-Jerusalem scene, the Israelis were watching the outside of the wall: they had one or more helicopter gunships circling the walls, and at least one was shown firing its machine guns at the zombie ant-pile to little effect. My impression was that a helicopter indeed sent an excited radio message but the zombie reaction to the singing was simply faster and in more force than the Israeli reaction to the zombies forming ant-piles.
My question is whether Pitt’s character hunted down the military pilot who stranded him in Jerusalem so he had to take the airline flight from hell. 
I missed that there was a toy counting. I just got tired of watching him look over his shoulder while running for his life. I kept thinking how impossible that would be in that environment if the people weren’t actors trying to stay out of his way.
I believe the helicopter was circling the protected area inside the wall and was ordered to go out and shoot the zombies. Of course it might have circled outside the wall as part of its patrol too, but I seem to recall that after the zombies came over the wall someone told the chopper to get out there.
There was an early establishing “Holy Crap!” shot of the wall from overhead with a helicopter patrolling around in the foreground. Where that helicopter was when the Zekes were ant-piling I have no idea.
One would think that the noise of the helicoptor would have already excited the zekes and the ‘little bit of singing’ would not have caught the attention over the walls.
Now, I realize at that point of the movie - they had not fully established ‘noise == attraction’ - but that shouldn’t have been hard to figure out.
Finally saw it last night and I liked it a great deal. It definitely exceeded my expectations considering that it was going to be a movie with fast zombies and I knew it would not be in the same style as the book.
As for the complaints that it didn’t follow the book - after seeing it, I somewhat have to disagree with that. No, it was not a movie containing a series of stories/vignettes gathered after the end of WWZ covering the initial outbreak, survival, and eventual winning the war. It was however a very good story about one person set during the initial 1/3rd of the book WWZ (the outbreak period) that managed to capture many elements/themes of the book in my opinion. It seems to me, we got a first hand vignette that would fit right into the early part of WWZ and that contained all the intensity, drama, fear, confusion, desperation, and horror of such a large portion of the world falling to the zekes. Obviously the terminal illness situation was a new twist to the WWZ history but it still allowed for most of the book’s history in the final 2/3rds - humanity regrouping and beginning to fight back and eventually turning the tide against the zekes. Just in the movie version, what gives them that breathing room to regroup is something else than presented in the book.
Things I particularly liked:
The scenes in Philly, Newark, and NYC (brief shot of Manhattan in chaos) along with the audible references to “Boston has fallen” were really handled well to drive home the magnitude of a zombie apocalypse. Some of the overhead shots, even later in the story including Jerusalem, showing the massive herds of zombies attacking were excellent.
The scenes showing the U.N. Command Center - the snippets of conversation, the confusion, the chaos as the world fell apart. I especially liked the comment to the Colonel requesting evacuation for him and his men.
The intertwining of news (t.v. and radio) throughout the opening scenes. I think zombie movies always seem to do this well - as people go about their daily lives, they show bits and pieces of news that at that moment don’t attract the characters attention but we as the audience realize are the early signs (unnoticed) of the zombie apocalypse.
The things that seemed to come over from the books like: the rabies story, the dogs being early warning vehicles, Korea going dark, and several references in the ending montage like lobos, the battle for Moscow, radio broadcast snippet urging people to “head North”, radio broadcast snippet from the “safe zone”, etc.
MeanJoe