Got around to seeing this today. It was OK popcorn entertainment, I guess, nothing I’d go see a second time or spend too many brain cells on analyzing. I did have to share this, though: When all hell was breaking loose on the plane, I turned to my wife and whispered “I’ve had it with these motherfucking zekes on this motherfucking plane!”.
They kind of threw any kind of realistic character actions right out the window from the opening. An explosion occurs up ahead and then a rogue garbage truck passes you. What the heck, let’s follow it. Never mind we have no idea what’s going on. Then we immediately get a scene from 2012 where there’s an escape route in the middle of mayhem.
The whole “they react to sound” was pretty poor.
“Shhhh, we need to sneak back to the plane. Let’s ride the most squeaky bikes we can find?”
“Never mind the jet engines and that they’re making a hell of a lot of noise themselves. We need to be quiet!”
“We need to get some viruses out of the zombie lab. Maybe we should divert them with some noise somewhere else? Nah, we’ll just tippy-toe. Who cares if we can ring phones wherever we want.”
Not to mention zombies only seem to react to noise people make, like stepping on glass or cans. Meandering docile must be really careful not to bump into things or creek doors.
zoog writes:
> I did have to share this, though: When all hell was breaking loose on the plane,
> I turned to my wife and whispered “I’ve had it with these motherfucking zekes
> on this motherfucking plane!”.
Yeah, so did I. Except, of course, that it wasn’t your wife that I turned to. Unless . . . look, forget I said anything.
World War Z, generic, small-scale and unambitious, very disappointing an absolute waste of its source material.
It had some good scenes and I’d be lying if I said I hated it but really if you’re going to call a zombie movie ‘World War Z’ then actually show us the war, a few screens on a ship showing some statistics and graphs doesn’t really cut it.
More ‘Battle of Jerusalem’ please, less ‘creeping around in badly lit corridors’ which every horror film never mind every zombie film has done since the year X.
Although I personally don’t find those sorts of films very scary or interesting to begin with which doesn’t help.
And one of the main points of the book was that there was no magic cure!
I really didn’t care that it didn’t follow the book, since I didn’t think the book was particularly good. It’s a very fine zombie movie, if you like zombie movies.
If you want something that is more like the book, I think it would have to be a television series, with each episode featuring a different vignette.
Well I personally don’t particularly like zombie stuff in general but loved the book.
I think my main problem with the movie is that I would have preferred it to show more of the large scale battles against the zombies (as in the scenes set in Jerusalem), small-scale zombie action has been done many times before, this was an opportunity to show something different.
Edited to add: Show an overview of the ‘war’ rather than following one mans experience of it, there’s nothing particularly wrong with the latter except that its not World War Z.
Edited again dammit: The book shows many different people’s personal experiences, so thats not a problem in itself
While that’s how the book was written, I don’t know that I would really like vignettes. I normally don’t like that kind of thing. I’d like to see a movie where they start with the first cases in China, the retired CIA guys researching it, Israel building fences, the first “rabies” outbreaks and special forces containing them, the Russian unit finding the zombie, the decimation, right up to the fall of cities.
The sequel would be the widespread outbreak, people trying to escape the traffic jams, Russia and India blowing bridges packed with the living, culminating in the fall of Yonkers.
Part three would be the implementation of the Rutiger plan (probably spelled wrong, I listened to the audio book), people recycling cars and taking war related jobs, the presidents speech where the world decides to fight back, Hope, the long step by step March from west to east.
Maybe the offensive could be a fourth movie on its own. That would be a hell of a payoff.
They might have to write in a new character who is involved in everything so we have someone to follow. Maybe one of the CIA guys at the start could be our guy, advising the president throughout the movies, being in on meetings with the military, talking about Yonkers, evacuation, talking to other countries about the decision to follow the Rutiger plan, economics, the offensive etc.
After the movies they could have a TV show interviewing people about their zombie experience. They could include the ones from the book that didn’t make the movie and add as many new stories as they want. That would probably be a successful show on its own.
So there it is. Let’s get Bill Gates and Warren Buffett behind this, and we’ll just write it ourselves here on the SDMB.
I don’t think you’d need a new character who is involved in everything - the narrator/author of the book/guy who collected all the stories is that character already.
I also think that “World War Z” would make an awesome television series, especially if it stayed true to the books and didn’t get turned into a “World War Walking Dead Zed.”
Yeah, I just envision the movie(s) happening real time instead of after-the-fact interviews. I want to live those events instead of hearing a documentary-like retrospective, but something has to tie them together and I don’t want an action hero to be closely involved in everything.
Anyway, I’m just the inspiration here. Once Buffet and Gates start writing blank checks, I can hire and fire as many writers as I need to until they get it right.
I just can’t believe that they didn’t at the very least ‘draw inspiration’ from some of the stories in the book.
I mean if anything was ever written to be a blockbuster action set-piece in a Hollywood movie ‘The Battle of Yonkers’ was it.
I got my hopes up when they said that Pitts character had been out of contact for three days, I expected the General to turn around and say that they were going for plan B, a conventional military assault and picking out Yonkers on a map.
But, no, we had to have thirty more minutes of Brad Pitt and buddies creeping around poorly lit corridors…
btw having read most of the previous posts in this thread I’ve lost a lot of respect for Brad Pitt (and I’ve liked most of the stuff he’s done) after learning that he bought the rights to the material and put himself centre-place, vanity project indeed.
I don’t think it would be too big a tweak to turn the retro-narrator who collects stories of what happened to a current narrator who is going around the world as things happen.
ETA: And I agree that things should happen “live” rather than as remembered events.
Well, you’ve got my support - that’s a start. 
Watched the film yesterday. Watching it, I kind of wondered if the film could have been in the style of a History Channel documentary with interviews spliced by “archival footage” of the zombie wars.
That said there were some gigantic plot problems:
-Why didn’t the Israelis bomb the hell out of anything 50 miles beyond the wall or at least have a few warplanes circling around all the time to blow up any zek concentrations? Not to mention they seem to have the left area right behind the wall still populated with civilians in what is the densely crowded and narrow area of Old Jerusalem. Either evacuate that area or build the wall further east.
-The plague spreads WAY too fast. This is one of the films I believe could have been spent being made longer, with rising tension as the zombie plague spreads around the world.
That’s basically my dream adaptation of WWZ, except with the conceit that alot of the non-interview scenes are just very high quality reenactments (this would also explain why the use of English instead of Chinese or Russion is some of the vignettes). I’ve no idea how the Redeker interview could be done onscreen though.
If you’re as big a screen draw as Brad Pitt is, it’s economically foolish to not put yourself into movies that you produce.
Although I love Romero, slow zombies don’t make any sense for world-wide outbreak. They’re a great foil for isolated people, but they’re not a credible extinction-level threat to humanity. In Night of the Living Dead, it’s just that: a single night. By morning, the sheriff and everyone else with a gun is rounding them up and restoring order. Slow zombie apocalypse movies tend to sort of gloss over the part where the zombies gain the upper hand on the entire world. WWZ the book did this as well. The scenes of everything falling apart as the zombies swarmed were the best part of this movie. The zombies were a credible threat.
I was pretty disappointed with the latter part of this movie. There was just so much stupid.
When Brad Pitt calls his UN boss from the Flight of the Living Dead and asks about a local medical test facility, the guy asks him why he needs to know. Uh, for the thing you sent me out to do like two days ago? And rather than just explain what he saw and his theory (which anyone could test), he has to go there personally. There’s simply no in-story reason for the third act at all.
The WHO guys can ring any phone in the building, but their best plan is to sneak past the zombies?
For some reason, in a facility that houses umpteen lethal pathogens in a single storage room, the door to the containing room just opens automatically whenever anyone walks by.
They could ring the phone in that room to distract the zombie that has him trapped and give him time to get his weapon, but they don’t.
They could pan the camera back and forth to communicate with him which illness to get, but they don’t, even though they pan the camera for an unrelated reason during the same scene.
Oh, I have no problem with that (and part of the reason I went to see the movie is that I actually like Brad Pitt and his movies), my problem with it is that he seems to have built the entire movie around himself and completely bastardised and disregarded the source material to do so.
He would have been pretty good as the narrater of events (he certainly has the voice for it) and could have worked himself into some scenes if necessary but what we got really was a massive ego-trip.
But I don’t know how much control he had over things so maybe I’m being unfair.
As for the rest of your post I agree on the slow zombie VS fast zombie thing, the military solution they came up with in the book wouldn’t work against fast zombies, they’d overwhelm the ‘squares’ before the defenders could lay down enough firepower to stop them.
I know I’ve mentioned it before but they really did miss a trick leaving out The Battle of Yonkers, the single creepiest part of the book for me was the description of the soldiers having head-up displays in their helmets designed to improve situational awareness, a good idea but not so good when it projects a satellite view showing hundreds of thousands if not millions of zombies converging on your position. :eek:
I don’t scare easily but that would do it! DH turning tail and running away in decidely non-heroic fashion
Also fast zombies could defeat even an M1 tank, if they completely swarmed it the crew wouldn’t be able to see where they were going and would get stuck on something, at that point the zombies couldn’t get in but the crew also couldn’t get out.
Agggghhhh, World War Z: The Movie…spits disgustedly 
Seriously? If the zombies are swarming the tank, why would the crew want to go anywhere? All the things they want to kill are right there! Just have another tank hose it down with machine gun fire, killing dozens or hundreds of zombies with trivial ease, and then continue on your way.
Zombies are not an existential threat. The only way they can be is if they’re playing second fiddle to another, more significant threat (like a necromancer or bioweapon that turns the victims of their earlier, more effective attack into weapons against the survivors), by raising everything and flooding the world with zombie rats, or by assuming that everyone in the world is as stupid as your average zombie fiction author.
It’s a little more complicated than that - This article has a pretty detailed run-down of the development of the movie. It’s worth a read.
I got pulled out of the movie momentarily at the scene with Brad Pitt stuck inside the cooler face to face with a zombie. I was laughing to myself since the zombie reminded me of beat up Ed Rooney from Ferris Bueller. Then I started thinking of the actor practicing the scene and how ridiculous it must have been and how Brad Pitt could keep a straight face through the scene. Like somebody doing an impersonation of a raptor. I almost got a case of the giggles.
Just how hard could it be to defeat an enemy that is brainlessly attracted to noise?
And how does a plague spread all over the world, if it takes only minutes or seconds for a bitten person to become a zombie?
Why did the giant Israeli security fence lack any kind of zombie detection gear or weaponry facing outwards? Why was there not an inner and outer fence?
Sadly, I spent much of the movie thinking stuff like that.
Well at that point in the book they’re dealing with a veritable sea of zombies, its hard to see the tank to hose it down if its completely covered in zombies and so is the entire surrounding area, where do you safely park the other tank so it also doesn’t get swarmed? I’m not sure it would be easy to lay down enough firepower to stop them, the book makes the point that its not like killing a human, unless the brain is destroyed or the body vapourised its still going to keep crawling forward.
The individual tank is going to run out of ammunition fairly quickly and if its a built up area its not going to be able to see to safely drive/reverse out of range, if it gets stuck the crew is going to run out of air or food/water before the zombies run out of patience.
The movie actually did a pretty good job of showing how hard those fast zombies would be to deal with in a large enough group and how intimidating they would be.