Babylon 5’s Michael Straczynski is adapting the screeplay from Max Brooks’ novel.
For Brad Pitt, who I’m sure is a great guy but not cool enough to star in this movie. At least I hope he isn’t. He’d fucking ruin it. Oh what the hell, they’re going to ruin it anyway if it even gets made.
MUST NOT HOPE!
It’s not that great to begin with. They might just improve on the original.
How can you kill, that which is allready dead?
I mean, how can you ruin, that which is allready rubbish?
I read the book even after reading the thread about it - I just love zombies too darn much… aaaand it just wasn’t very good.
I wish it’d been written by Larry Bond or Tom Clancy - come to think of it most of Clancys latest adversaries hasn’t been more farfetched than zombies - at least they would have painted a cronological and believable picture of the major battles seen through the eyes of a few wooden but somewhat believeable characters instead of these faux interviews with really forgettable people.
And how do a zombie infestation like this happen in the first place, when the zombies overwhelm, eat or rip apart most of the victims we are told about? If most victims are utterly destroyed by the zombies their numbers shouldn’t rise exponentially as they do, but slowly dwindle.
The book was boring and did badly in the ‘suspension of disbelief’-department.
Thought the idea was cool, but the execution was mediocre. I could see this as a SciFi channel series.
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More work for Casper Van Diem! I’ll alert his agent immediately.
The book is a classic which will be added to the required reading lists in every major college, after the coming apocalypse. It’s written for specialists, meaning people who are hardcore into cannibal zombies, not for generalists. I read it as Studs Terkel on the living dead. Most of Terkel’s subjects weren’t too interesting in and of themselves. It was the way Terkel used them to describe their times that made them work, and Brooks, though not as gifted a writer, is shooting for the same target.
But addressing your point, to the extent that the book is flawed, and I don’t think it is but reasonable minds may differ, it’s because it uses words to describe a thing whose horror is primarily visual. Handled properly, and I don’t think it will be though Straczynksi’s presence and Pitt’s name and money are encouraging, I think it could make a better movie than it made a book. And indeed a miniseries could work, but Sci Fi wouldn’t let Tom Savini near it.
Think HBO or Showtime.
I read the book even after reading the thread about it - I just love zombies too darn much… aaaand it just wasn’t very good.
I wish it’d been written by Larry Bond or Tom Clancy - come to think of it most of Clancys latest adversaries hasn’t been more farfetched than zombies - at least they would have painted a cronological and believable picture of the major battles seen through the eyes of a few wooden but somewhat believeable characters instead of these faux interviews with really forgettable people.
You’re confusing Duane Jones with Harrison Ford. The people aren’t the stars. The situation is the star.
And how do a zombie infestation like this happen in the first place, when the zombies overwhelm, eat or rip apart most of the victims we are told about? If most victims are utterly destroyed by the zombies their numbers shouldn’t rise exponentially as they do, but slowly dwindle.
If Z bites A, even if Z comes at A really hard with the intent to eat A, armed with nothing but hands and teeth, A will almost always get away. While it’s relatively easy to kill someone, it’s hard to utterly destroy a body. The now-infected A will probably get away in good enough shape that when A rises as Z2, Z2 can bite many other people.
The cannibalistic gangbangs Brooks describes are merely for color. Even Romero’s movies only do that once per flick.
The book was boring and did badly in the ‘suspension of disbelief’-department.
Are you sure you love zombies? George suspended my disbelief 25 years ago. All I needed was the zombies.
Plenty of writers have succeeded where Brooks fail - John Skipp and Craig Spectors two anthologies are good examples - so the words aren’t the problem. Just the hack using them.
You’re confusing Duane Jones with Harrison Ford. The people aren’t the stars. The situation is the star.
Which is what Bond and Clancy does well and Brooks doesn’t. None of the three writers write good characters, but at least the two I mentioned tries. They present interesting scenarios done well. Brooks had ideas I really wanted to read, but bored me to tears and instead of going with select scenarios and really kick ass, he just jumps from place to place without ever going into depth or making us care for the people.
Are you sure you love zombies? George suspended my disbelief 25 years ago. All I needed was the zombies.
Me too. But that was also one farmhouse and one cemetary - not the whole world. Brooks gets cudos for trying such a bold undertaking, but not for failing.
Actually a Showtime/HBO series would be much better for such a grand scale. Jericho with zombies or like Dexter, which proved to be better than the book. But it would have to be a new story every week or really depart from the source and find a key location and characters and let the ‘world’ part of the war be background information.
If fucking Angelina Jolie doesn’t fit your definition of cool, I don’t know what to tell you.
You’re confusing cool with hawt. If Angelina weighed 300 pounds, the blood rituals and the serial adoption of little brown mascots would be a bit off-putting.
Wait, so you think it’s HOT that Pitt has sex with Jolie?
I’ll stick with thinking it’s pretty cool.
Indiana-Duane-Jones…
whatever happened to that guy…shoulda’ been a star, I could see him in alot of Sidney Poitee-aa’s roles.
The first one was. I’m pretty sure that Dawn and Day, followed by Land showed the whole world (or at least all of America) taken over.
Showed, hinted at, told us - but the focus was still on smaller scale. A Mall and a underground army base. Land was the first to really show a large scale and also the first to really suck - sorry George.
We know in Romeros films that it’s all of the US hit and probably the rest of the world, but that’s not the story he tells. He focusses on individual characters and their fight for survival (mostly against each other). World War Z wants to show the whole world (and space and the bottom of the ocean) and doesn’t contain a single interesting character.
I thought the opening of Dawn does a pretty good job of showing society begin to collapse, rescue stations are already overrun, news channels are going off the network, police are running away. I agree it doesn’t show how this happened in the way WWZ tries to though.
Day does show the complete desertion of the town and place its protagonists underground - the only safe place they can find, although, I see what you’re saying, it’s not on the scale of WWZ.
Both films do then focus on the individuals but they do at least try to give a background to the problems and place them in a wider perspective
If they get the Battle of Yonkers right the rest will be gravy.
You can’t do the Battle of Yonkers right. How the fuck do ZOMBIES beat a TANK?
You can totally make a great movie about a world-wide zombie infestation. But it won’t look a little bit like World War Z. Movies need interesting characters that we don’t read 10 pages about and then never hear from again.
I’ve been pushing a “Zombies treated as a disaster” movie for years. You’ve got one plot following the president, one following the plucky anti-establishment scientist, one following some special forces badass, and then one following some Joe and Jane Q. Public. Tell me you wouldn’t pay $8 for that movie if it got a $60M budget.
I was totally confused about the zombie thing until I realized the 2 was a Z. Time to turn up the oxygen dial on my tank.
A script adaptation I’d suggest is to definitely have a scene where some blind old Japanese dude with a katana drops out of a tree to attack some zombies, totally whiffs with his samurai-sudo slash, and is then eaten.
By totally sticking it to the MAN, that’s how!
You can totally make a great movie about a world-wide zombie infestation. But it won’t look a little bit like World War Z. Movies need interesting characters that we don’t read 10 pages about and then never hear from again.
JMS writes excellent characters, so I’m hoping he’ll fix that flaw of the book. As a matter of fact, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall to hear his reactions to reading the book. JMS is not a an easy man to please. He could make this entire forum’s reaction to WWZ look like a PR campaign.
Rawhhhhh zombies are bringing this thread back from the dead.
From Variety, Marc Forster to direct.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117995840.html?categoryid=13&cs=1
Interesting choice. I still believe that the book is better suited to be adapted into a episodic mini series. A lot of characters and individual stories introduced across a long time frame (initial breakout, pandemic, resolution) to be squeezed into 90 min. But I’m still interested to see how this turns out.
-Tim