‘World War Z’ trailer debuts, and the movie looks terrible
And here it is, with thoughts after the jump.
I am a huge fan of Max Brooks’ book “World War Z,” so when I heard it was being made into a movie trilogy, I instantly became excited. But then the production on the first installment hit snags. First with the script then budget then more script issues and, uh oh, I knew something was rotten.
This trailer kind of confirms it. I’ll still see this movie because it has zombies in it, but if the trailer is a good representation of it, then I won’t like it. Here’s why:
- The book is the best zombie-themed horror ever written. It’s told in interview narrative, where we hear the tales of various situations and survivors of World War Z, also known as the zombie apocalypse. This gives us various characters to get to know, and it gives us unique looks at the situation and how it was dealt with from various points of view within context of the book’s themes. The movie looks like it’s going to be one-part “2012″ with one-part “I Am Legend” with eight parts horrible CGI. The focus of the book was the survivors and their stories, and it doesn’t look like we’ll get that with the movie.
- Zombies shouldn’t run because it doesn’t make sense, physiologically speaking. They’re rotting flesh and muscle and bone, not athletes. So watching this trailer made me cringe because the zombies are not only running, but they’re jumping and climbing over one another, creating a zombie mudslide. It looks silly and the idea of it is absurd. Plus, running zombies would completely destroy all of us. Zombies do not tire and they’re ever persistent, which is why they’re terrifying. They don’t feel pain and can only be stopped by destroying the brain. The zombie in and of itself is a scary thing. Running zombies is just overkill.
- The single hero idea is exactly what I didn’t want in this movie. Brad Pitt is cool, I like Pitt, but I wanted him to be the interviewer who meets with survivors and tells us their stories, rather than being the focus of the movie.
- The effects look bad, but it is just a trailer, and the movie is months away from release, so my opinion on it might change.
My excitement level has dropped considerably for “World War Z.”
Thank you for joining our conversation on Lights, Camera, Reaction. We encourage your discussion but ask that you stay within the bounds of our commenting and posting policy.
Comments
I knew this would happen, what a wank job by Hollywood, just what I didn’t want more cartoon bogus CGI. Its sad its been turned into a star vehicle for Pitt, also knew thats what was going on after so many rewrites. I Also just read that Damon Lindelof of Prometheus infamy was hired to smear his writing feces on the third act of this travesty. I will not even go into the tidal wave wall crawling zombies, its… just stupid. I will just have to live with my Walking Dead, Romero movies (minus the diary and survival piles) and skip this turd hurdler.
The point of them running is that they are nearly unstoppable. Unless one was injured or in a small space, walking Zombies could be easily avoided, even in massive groups. But the fact that they can sprint makes them overwhelm all of our weapons and tactics. How do you avoid billions of sprinting corpses?
You can’t.
Also, anything dead couldn’t move. It’s dead. You have to suspend reality to allow for fiction to plausible.
Thanks for the comments!
Ryan: Sure, we suspend our belief so things like zombies can exist. But there are rules to be followed. Every monster has a weakness, and zombies are dead and slow. Thus, they are restricted by their own biology. It’s a simultaneous strength and weakness. Running zombies aren’t avoidable, like you said. It makes for very short stories and very small survivor rates. Like Simon Pegg once said: Being dead is a disability, not a super power.
The zombie purists with their elitist litmus tests autojudge thumbs down, as expected. You can easily tell those who have read the book. They already know this is not a zombie story. Fast versus slow zombies – yeah you’re the coolest geek fanboy. Congratulations on your ongoing virginity. WWZ is a critique of government, culture, and internationalism. Zombies are the MacGuffin. Google it. The Hollywood owners have already said they are planning this as a trilogy. This movie is setup. The third film will cover the book’s narrative time frame of the end looking back. Hollywood needs franchises or they can’t make money. If you can’t get past the zombie “rules” feel free to stay home worshiping your Romero shrines. The theatre experience will be much more enjoyable without you.
Nothing about the trailer indicated it would explore any of the themes of the book. And that’s fine, we have a long time before the movie comes out so we’ll get more trailers and featurettes and the so on to further react to. But based on this trailer, the movie looks like it’ll hold little resemblance to the book it’s adapted from, even if it is telling one-third of the story.
I was really looking forward to having a “District 9″ style interview and then flashbacks in this film. I think it would have been a great hit. I can understand that they want to get 3 movies out of this, but if they flop on the first movie, no one is going to watch the next two.
Slow moving zombies makes for interesting fight scenes because it would take a bit of intelligence and strategy to kill them. Even if you have a cache of bullets if you were just firing blindly into a crowd of zombies you would soon be overtaken by the pure volume of zombies coming at you.
I wonder if the original script was written like the book but the producers decided to rewrite it because it was too overbudget. What do you think?
I’m not too sure what the original script was like, but I imagine it was more true to the book, and that’s why things were changed. I read yesterday that director Marc Forster struggled to decide if he wanted walking or running zombies, and finally settled on running zombies just days before shooting began. Maybe that’s why they look a mess in the trailer?
@BrooksFan
Wow, you could serve a four course meal on that chip on your soldier. The ironic thing is you are lambasting fanboys, yet the style in which you are attacking fanboys is completely foaming-at-the-mouth, blindfaith method that makes me wonder if you actually work for the studio that is producing WWZ. Calm down, you look like a fool. Also, the “trilogy” rumors were a year ago during development hell when the movie ideas were all over the place. The trilogy idea died when the trailer and summer release came out. Nice try, fanboy.
This movie is about as far away from what made the book wonderful. Running Olympian poorly CGI’d (I Am Legend CGI studio doing same work for WWZ?) zombies take everything out of the book. The slow, creeping way the zombie virus spread globally what was truly wonderful about Max Brooks creation. The zombie virus was slowly spreading yet no one knew what to do and international responses to the growing crisis and confusion was mixed, deadly and often times frightening. When zombies are fast and happen over night, it takes away all the potential for gritty political intrigue and international politics with a humanist study and replaces it with run of the mill, straight-to-Netflix style zombie-pacolypse shlock.
WWZ should have been a Children of Men style study on international response to a frightening crisis. Max Brooks and Robert Kirkman brought life back into the now oversaturated zombie genre…I was hoping this film would bring the genre to a respectable close, but hey, that’s Hollywood for you. They love money and know how to squeeze it out of things.
It really makes me angry the way they did this. It just takes everything that made the book good and threw it out the window and for some reason just kept the name.