It was also directed by* Frank Miller, so his take on it was the one they stayed with.
*I seem to recall there was some controversey about Rodriguez and Miller co-directing, and how they would be credited.
Pulled from Sin City’s Wiki page:
Three directors received credit for Sin City: Miller, Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, the last for directing one scene in the film. Miller and Rodriguez worked as a team directing the rest of the film. Despite having no previous directorial background, Miller was substantially involved in the film’s direction, providing direction to the actors on their motivations and what they needed to bring to each scene. Because of this (and the fact that Miller’s original books were used as storyboards), Rodriguez felt that they should both be credited as directors on the film.
When the Directors Guild of America refused to allow two directors that were not an established team to be credited (especially since Miller had never directed before), Rodriguez first planned to give Miller full credit. Miller would not accept this, as he certainly could not have done it without Rodriguez. Rodriguez, also refusing to take full credit, decided to resign from the Guild so that the joint credit could remain.
So, props to Rodriguez for deciding sharing credit with Miller was more important than staying in the DGA.
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Actually think WWZ looks really intense - it’s great to have a movie tackle the scale and scope of a potentially apocalyptic zombie outbreak – no prior zombie movie has really had the budget or nerve to depict the fall of civilization, other than from the perspective of a handful of people or by focusing on the “zombie world” after civilization has already fallen.
Fast zombies may not be as iconic as Romero’s ghouls, but at least it makes them seem threatening enough to possibly overrun the world, which is always so difficult to explain sensibly that it’s usually just ignored (which is sadly preferable to the absurd crap in the WWZ novel). WWZ looks like a tense, frightening, “end of world” flick, and since I love that genre, my expectations for this movie have significantly increased.
Since the novel WWZ was largely dreadful, discarding it can only be an improvement - unsure why the producers bothered buying the licensed property (acquired in a bidding war, no less) and then produced such an adaptation that’s so unrelated. Then again, the project seems to have made no shortage of decisions that foolishly burned money.
Since the novel WWZ was largely dreadful, discarding it can only be an improvement
You’re entering a world of pain…
Not really; there was a lengthy thread here on the book when released and the consensus was very negative. Zombie Survival Guide was great, however.
I must not have been around then, because World War Z, the book, was quite awesome and enthralling. The Zombie Survival Guide was fun, but ultimately a zombie themed version of the hundreds of other survival guides that came out around the same time.
I think WWZ became a focal point of zombie nitpicking because it was one of the first big mainstream zombie apocalypse books. I do think some of the things that happen are implausible (Yonkers, for example) but it hit the right tone for me to enjoy. I also like the central conceit of a guy doing interviews after the fact, so you had all sorts of unreliable POVs. It’s not a work of literary genius, but I think it’s good enough to stand proud on the shelf.
More to the point, I don’t think I’ve ever read a better written zombie apocalypse novel. The genre is filled with garbage.
Erm, I Am Legend. The original is still the greatest. (Tho’s technically it’s a bacterial vampire apocalypse…)
Zone One is, in my opinion, the best written zombie apocalypse book. I do happen to like WWZ, though I get where folks like Desslock are coming from. I just don’t feel strongly enough about the details to sweat them.
I’m strictly talking about zombies. Straight-up undead walkers.
The genre has really exploded, but most of the books I’ve read with zombies are really bad. Like, awful. Barely readable garbage.
Case in point: Feed.
Not to re-open old wounds, but has anybody done the math to see how many zombies could actually exist vs. killing power of various law enforcement / military organizations?
Like (assuming magic-zombies), total number of dead bodies - decomposition? (Bio-zombies seem rather less problematic.)
Also, it might be interesting to see a historical roundup of zombie-killing capacity throughout various eras. The effect of larger standing armies vs. less efficient weapons, etc.
Well, one of the things that makes WWZ a little more problematic is that, unlike the Romero films and Walking Dead you aren’t doomed to return as a zombie just by dying - you have to be infected, usually by being bitten. So by removing a really huge infection vector it should make containment much easier since you’ve dropped the number of zombies facing you big time. I am assuming the movie follows that part of the book, though.
Also, it might be interesting to see a historical roundup of zombie-killing capacity throughout various eras. The effect of larger standing armies vs. less efficient weapons, etc.
There’s a Zombie Survival Guide spin-off comic that looks at outbreaks throughout history.
I never read WWZ. Having seen the trailer, I’m not really looking down on it. The first trailer had what looked like some bad special effects, and I’m not sure about super hyped-up zombies crawling all over each other like a bunch of fire ants. But it looks like a movie that might have a lot going on, some good actors, and clearly good funding. If nothing else a summertime blow-some-stuff-up popcorn movie, mebbe.
I’ll wait for real reviews before I decide to see it, but I’m not going to slam it based on differences from the book or a couple trailers.
WWZ’s problems wemt a lot deeper than people nitpicking individual implausible chapters, though.
The movie looks like it solves some of WWZ’s problems but, uh, they seem to have replaced them with a new set.
Oh, I agree that WWZ isn’t great. I criticized it extensively in the book thread about it. My issue here is Hollywood supposedly basing a film on a book and then making a film that’s nothing like said book. Why bother? Why not just generate a new IP instead? Fans of the novel will find much to hate in an “adaptation” that’s entirely divorced from the source material, and non-fans won’t care either way. There’s no potential upside, only down.
That’s a great summary and I think exactly nails the issue.
Take away the book license/name and they wouldn’t be automatically irritating the hell out of people who are fans of the book (warts and all). So why bother?
You’d think they’d be better off eating whatever cost they paid for the rights instead of ending up so easily alienating their target audience.
It’s not like LoTR or something with hugely distinct characters that would really suffer from a different title. They could have named it whatever they pleased once it was obvious that the script was not really going to have much in common with the book, other than Zombie Apocalypse #37.
It seems like you’re assuming a lot from a trailer. It could be that the script includes enough similarities to the book that they need the license for legal reasons. Or an earlier draft might have hewed more closely, who knows? It’s a weird thing to second-guess from a position of (essentially) no information.
I mentioned this upthread, but it’s an easy assumption. Every chapter, scene, and tactic in WWZ is based on slow shambling zombies, and thus vast swathes of the books are rendered instantly useless by the change to parkour sprinters. Instead of a crisis that starts slow and then builds momentum, humanity will have just weeks to come up with some awesome counter to the threat. There’s nothing like that in WWZ. Victory comes after years of grueling fighting, wholesale tactics and weaponry changes, abandonment of most of the world to the Z’s, and so on. Getting rid of that gets rid of everything.