So we agree with everything except the combination to Captain Kirk’s safe in This Side of Paradise.
I’ve already managed to get used to the idea that it wasn’t going to be anything like the book. I didn’t see anything that affirmatively placed the story in the WWZ universe, even. But it doesn’t look terrible, and for my money the fact that they are in tone essentially promising a hopeful ending is a big win. I hate when people who do zombie stuff are scared shitless of being accused of pussing out and insist on stamping out all hope at the end for the people we just spent 90 minutes with.
Ironically, while Night of the Living Dead didn’t end with the people we’d been watching during the movie being saved, it did pretty much say that the zombie threat as a whole had been overcome.
I feel stupid putting up spoiler warnings. The movie came out forty-four years ago. If you haven’t seen it by now, you presumably don’t care.
There’s one and only one way to adapt WWZ: extended cable series, one or two episodes spanning a script for each chapter.
This loud, shiny creature in the OP resembles not the book.
I agree that it doesn’t look much like the book at all, although beats me how you’d successfully film the book. However, particularly since I read the thread on my phone last night and have only now seen the trailer, I’m surprised to say that I think that looks way cool. Nice shooty-go-boom stuff, and Brad Pitt is always pleasant to look at even if the guy can’t act for shit.
It was neat to see zombies exhibit ant-like behavior in crossing obstacles. Though in some scenes it was difficult to tell who was a zombie and who was a human fleeing from one.
That’s a feature, not a defect!
Well, it looks like more fun than the zombie romcom trailer I saw yesterday.
But…but…he can!
What movie was that?
I’m one of the ones lamenting how little the trailer looks like the book, but I will go see it. I’ll see anything science fiction/post apocalyptic related; I just wish they wouldn’t try to bait-and-switch us by putting the wrong title on a movie. If the movie bears almost no resemblance to a book, they really shouldn’t use the same title as the book - that just isn’t right.
That said, we’re basing all this on the two minute trailer; I guess we’ll see when the movie actually comes out.
**Obfusciatrist **is probably referring to Warm Bodies. I actually think it looks pretty good.
Ooh, that does look good!
Sounds like the scripts had severe issues: JM Strazinski apparently making an awful mess, then Carnahan brought in to salvage.
Sounds like the movie people only wanted the title, and made little effort to be faithful to the source material. Sad, but not shocking behaviour.
Yes, Warm Bodies is apparently what I was referring to. Looks awful to me, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
I’m probably giving it the benefit of the doubt; I’ve always been a sucker for a good zomcom.
Trailer looks good to me. I don’t really care that it differs from the book. Frankly, if you tried to make a faithful adaptation of the book you would probably end up with a crap film.
I hope that it really is the might of the military actually fighting zombies. So many zombie films narrow the focus to a small group of people trying to survive, and we have seen that, its all been done before. Hopefully the focus here remains wide, and we see what really would happen.
Is that Israeli soldier carrying an M-249? WTF?
Trailer looks like a decent Zombie movie but not WWZ. My favorite part of the book was always the story of the family who left for Canada and ended up falling apart under the stress. Not sure of that would make for a good movie though.
Might be half-decent flick on its own merits but why did they have to call it World War Z? It isn’t. Max Brooks on fast zombies. They were faster even than the Rage Infected from 28 Days Later for Christ’s sakes. The CGI also looked pretty shoddy to me, in that it stuck out like a sore thumb.
I laughed - we’ll see it.
Nice to see Zombies being able to branch out of the typecasting.
A couple of things that bugged me about the trailer:
In the car scene, we can clearly see that the street is lined with cars that can’t go any place as the police motorcycle is pulling up yelling at Brad Pitt to get back in the car. Cut to the inside of the car and we see a the cop get suddenly plowed into by what turns out to be a garbage truck. But it couldn’t possibly have squeezed in-between the gridlocked cars, nor taken anybody by surprise in the process of managing to bowl any of those other cars out of the way. It could have been just some sloppiness in cutting the trailer, putting two scenes together for drama, but I’ve stepped through the frames and I find that the same building seems to be on the left side of the vehicle as the cop rides up between rows of stuck vehicles, as the cop is seen yelling at Brad Pitt just before being plowed into and then afterwards as the garbage truck speeds away. It looks like the scene was really filmed with a garbage truck suddenly appearing at a high rate of speed where cars didn’t even have room to pass.
There’s a scene with zombies being machine gunned while they pour over a bus instead of going around it. It’s one thing for the zombies to be scaling a building in an army ant like fashion, and that’s an interesting new twist on the premise. But they’re not forming a pile of bodies in the bus scene, they’re just Jackie Channing the fuck up the side of it and over. And the momentum of their onslaught is apparently just rolling the bus on over. I find it, however, visually implausible that they’re imparting enough angular momentum to this big-ass thing to push it over without shedding any of their own momentum.
Normally, I’m not the sort of person who goes through film clip frame-by-frame, but these things caught my attention after a couple of viewings. Even in frame-by-frame the CGI zombies that struck me on first viewing as a homogenous mass of greyish human-like silhouettes I now see are somewhat varied – they appear to be overwhelmingly bald white males wearing slacks and white or black t-shirts. Again, it fits with the concept to aggressively de-humanize them, but the cut-and-pastedness of it stands out.
Also, somebody mentions that they need Brad Pitt’s character because he’s “especially suited for the job”, but it never says what that is. But of course, it’s a standard trope especially in action movies that the protagonist is awesome, and sometimes you just have to establish that fact by having somebody just say it. See also: Every Steven Segal film.
So, I’m actually less concerned at the lack of any apparent connection between the book and the movie. I’m more concerned that this interesting high-concept rethinking of the zombie concept is going to be marred by incoherent story boarding and visuals that emphasize action over plausibility. I’m not an expert on these things, so feel free to object, but I take these things as signs that the movie is going to be stupid. Well, okay, Die Hard 4 was stupid and I still enjoyed the hell out of it, but…