World War Z movie FAIL

My wife and I saw this and liked it a bit. I started the book a few years back but didn’t like the style so I only got through 50 pages or so.

I love 28 days later and like some of the other zombie movies.

I like how they had some different types of zombies, how they were so mindless, they would crawl on each other to make a zombie ladder…a little different take.

We enjoyed it.

Just saw this one and really enjoyed the hell out of it. All the issues folks are picking on are valid, but they didn’t bother me.

I enjoyed it as well. It meandered a bit, but was an overall fun movie.

This is me as well. Enjoyed the book and really enjoyed this (largely unrelated) movie. There are definitely issues, but it was a really kick-ass action movie so it’s a winner IMO.

Just rented this this weekend and the wife and I enjoyed it for what it was. I could never get fully into the book but trudged through to abotu half way point before finally giving up. The points of the movie that touched on the book were probably my favorite parts. It was an ok zombie movie just not a good World War Z movie.

I really hated the idea of of a 12 second turn and even thought wtf! when they specifically said that air travel was how it became global. Seriously ?!?!?! if people were changing within 12 seconds, even with a few taking up to 10 minutes as suggested, there is no way air travel could spread the virus.

It was decent. The worst thing they did was title it World War Z. That was like false advertising. Ive seen movies take licence with the source material before but not many have been so far off as this movie was. I honestly think it would have done better if it had not attached itself to the novel. Pretty much anyone who finished the book knew there was no way that the novel would work in a single movie format. The book is basically a serialized short story collection. It would make an awesome mini series though. Anyway, as mentioned before, not a bad movie, just a bad WWZ movie.

Glad to hear that the movie turned out ok. When I rent it I’ll pretend that I don’t know the title.

Apparently the sequel is now in the works and Juan Antonio Bayona (director of The Orphanage and The Impossible) has signed on to direct. Brad Pitt will produce and probably star. No word on Lindelof’s involvement yet.

— Alan

That’s great news. JAB’s got the goods.

We picked this up from Amazon on the cheap and turned out to enjoy the movie. The only thing I really didn’t like about the movie was that it was called World War Z. I spent the whole movie having to say “ok, no, just forget the title. This is just another zombie movie that isn’t based on the book. Enjoy it for what it is”. As a zombie movie, it was above average for the genre.

The ending was a little…meh. It just all kind of wrapped up wrong, like they had an hour of content that should have been there that was cut. But hey, now they can do the sequel to cover what happens next.

Finally rented this from RedBox over the weekend and agree with most people in the thread, i tdidn’t suck, and was an OK action zombie flick, but had absolutely zero relation to World War Z. They should have called the movie something else. I wonder how much money they had to pay Max Brooks for just a title, since they obviously took nothing from the written version of the story?

Zombies!

That said, I thought it had a lot of good bits. The initial scenes, of Pitt’s family trying to escape and be recued, were fantastic. Really tense, and even through the viewer knew going in what the deal was, those scenes still managed to convey mystery, anxiety, threat and fear really well. Nicely directed and acted all around during those parts. The latter bits in Jeruselum and Wales felt less tense (you knew Pitt would make it out, and didn’t care as much about his companions as you did his family in the earlier scenes), but were still well done. As someone upthread mentioned, it’s the connective tissue in between the scenes where the movie fell short. This is a simple screenwriting thing. For example, the leap from the aircraft carrier to going to South Korea was decent. They had intel, it was from before the epidemic, and it mentioned zombies specifically, so it’s a good place to begin. From there it goes way downhill. Why would a CIA guy in prison in Korea know about secret goings on in Jeruselum? Then they get to Jeruselum and make an almost immediate leap to India based on practically nothing at all. Wales is where we end up, with a half-baked idea about mindless zombies not wanting to be bothered biting people who had a terminal condition. Um, why? Most of those terminal conditions would be cancelled out by the transformation process. A zombie isn’t going to care if it had cancer or malaria or whatever. The doctors even said that disease couldn’t kill the zombies because they had no functioning respitory or circulatory systems, so why would they care about diseased hosts?

Oh well, I’d still rent a sequal should it ever come out. I would also very much like to see a movie or a TV series adapting the actual stories and format form the World War Z source material. It would be more like The Walking Dead, only with less inter-personal drama and more zombie fighting goodness.

This was my main gripe as well. It seemed like a bunch of scenes clumsily linked for the sake of of the story, rather than in service of the story.

Best example I can think of is the plane crash. Zombie on the plane (big surprise) which results in a crash landing. Thankfully our two protagonists are the (seemingly) only survivors. More-so they happen to be within an injured hobbling distance of their final destination. A turn of events so unlikely as to be laughable, but the movie just carries on without a care for any credibility.

This movie died on the cutting room floor.

Until seeing the author’s name “Max Brooks” right above your spoiler tag followed by “Zombies” have I never thought how bad I wanted to see a Mel Brooks Zombie pic! Classic Brooks at that, Blazing Saddles or the like.

Timing is everything. Instead of, for instance, High Anxiety we may have gotten Night of the Not So Dead, except I don’t think America was ready for gore comedy back in the '70s.

They are related, by the way. Max is Mel’s son.

I was feeling off pretty much everything so I watched World War Z today on Netflix.

It was expecting absolutely awful, so I was pleasantly surprised up until Pitt has his camouflage brainstorm. That was so stupid I don’t really have words for it. Everything except the “solution” is entertaining, if somewhat forgettable overall. It might have been a 3-star “it’s OK” movie if it weren’t for that.

By the way, I watched this over the weekend and forgot about this thread.

I hated this movie. The beginning of the outbreak and getting to the boat was tense and well-done, but everything else just made me angry. (At this point, I’d like to reiterate that I have no real loyalty to the book as a movie. I liked the book, but totally understand that Pitt and co wanted to make a different movie just springboarding from the concept.) Fuck this movie. It had a few good scenes, like the immediately decisive way Pitt cut off that girl’s hand, but stupid shit like the blowing the plane up and the only people unhurt are Pitt and the girl? Wow! Lucky them! And everything at WHO? Ugh.

I’d say I liked pretty much everything up until Pitt threw the grenade in the airplane. I liked, for example, how a single Zed resulted in conversion of pretty much the entire plane. It was looking like a no-win situation there. I wouldn’t say it was great, but it was very watchable.

It gets pretty crappy from the moment Pitt wakes up at the WHO facility. The way the researchers treated him was ridiculous. Why treat him as a dangerous criminal until they talk to the UN undersecretary? And of course that segues into the stupid “zeds can magically sense otherwise invisible diseases” idea.

Yeah, the disease angle was stupid. Was that in the book? I read part of it and got a bit bored and abandoned it. The movie was pretty meh for me. Glad it was on Netflix for free.

I’ve not read the book. I’ve read the first Brooks zombie novel, “The Zombie Survival Guide.” Which used all the regular zombie rules, it was just an amusing slant on talking about the same concepts. From what I’ve read, “World War Z” does not involve anything particularly unusual, it’s more a series of short zombie stories strung together.