World War Z movie FAIL

Anyone seen the new trailer for this? This could go down as the worst movie adaptation of all time.
So disappointed doesn’t even begin to express it.

Why are the zombies constantly falling over like that? very strange!

The zombie movement is weirdly fluid-like. But it’s not something I’ve seen before, I’ll give it that.

But they’re asking him to leave his family!

It’s like the way the ghost army flowed over the battlefield in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. I’m not sure I like it at all.

It looks like, I’m hoping, early CG because those zombies … yeah.

Not in the least surprised. Ever since they announced it, it was clear the film was going to drop everything that made the book great.

Yeah, that is disappointing. It looks more like the blob than a zombie horde.

Yeah, those aren’t WWZ zombies at all. Instead of Romero shamblers, we get sprinting wall climbers. Very skeptical this will be good.

I like the idea they are so ravenous they just crush each other underfoot but yeah, too flowy and too CGIy.

Well, it’s not zombies as I know (or like) them, but who am I kidding. I’ll be there day one.

The ravenous crushing part would be fine, sure, but the horror of WWZ or Romero zombies comes from their ponderous inevitability, the inescapability of an enormous horde that’s little threat on an individual basis but collectively invincible. By contrast, sprinting parkour zombies would be so effective that there wouldn’t be time for horror, just a quick burst of terror before they caught and killed you (and then ate the rest of the world as well).

I’m going to be the outcast and say I’m pleasantly surprised. We’ve had zombie films/books/shows/comforters out the wazoo for the last decade, give or take a few years. In all that time, there’s been very little change to the paradigm beyond “walker vs. runner”. This trailer gives us zombies as a flood, almost a force of nature in terms of disasters. I’m reserving judgement on this one.

That was my first impression as well, and it was a bad one.

The book had zombies that were trapped inside cars for years because they didn’t possess the intelligence to open a door, now we see hordes of them running at superhuman speeds and scaling sheer walls like some kind of storm surge. How the fuck does the blind guy with the sword combat that shit? I guess he doesn’t and is just dropped, along with most of the original story. So now this becomes just another zombie movie, only with Brad Pitt to lend it mass appeal.

It’s hasn’t been a secret that the only thing from the book that is being used is the general idea of a worldwide zombie plague. Supposedly, we’ll get a few bits from the book like the jets bombing the bridge, but even that will be reworked to fit the goofy tidal wave of zombies.

Blech. Disappointing.

The best zombie material actually isn’t about zombies. Romero’s first two flicks had overarching symbolism (fear of the other/satire of Americana).

World War Z is (too me) an ecological-disaster apocalypse thriller in the guise of a “I, Zombie” set of memoirs. It really, really reminded me of the old eco-apocalypse potboiler Nature’s End (and to some extent War Day), written by Streiber and some other guy.

So of course Hollywood is going to fuck it up. Take a book often surprising in its thoughtfulness and attention to detail, and turn it into a big budget 28 Days Later Pt. 3. So fuck you, Hollywood.

NPR had an interview with Romero on Halloween. I had to laugh because they asked him about the deeper meanings in the first film in regards to race relations (the main character, an African American, is shot by white men with dogs and guns) and George paused…then told the interviewer that they actually had cast a white guy for the role but that he backed out at the last second or so. He then went on to discount almost all other mentions of deeper meaning in the film. From his viewpoint, he was simply making a horror film.

Now, Dawn of the Dead on the other hand was written after Romero was given access to one of the first malls to open in America. He did write that one with mindless consumerism in mind.

It couldn’t possible miss the point as badly as I Am legend.

I refuse to believe that anyone has made a movie adaptation of I Am Legend in the last 20 years.

What I about I Am Legend with Will Smith? Ohh, I get it.

— Alan