World War Z

A Ken Burns like faux documentary was what I originally imagined when I heard they were making the book into a film. It would be epic and awesome.

Sheryl Nantus said:

You can't hire Brad Pitt, pay him a zillion dollars and have him just narrate the story.

Unfortunately.

So now they've warped the book to make his character jumping around the world to find something, somewhere, someone, yatta yatta yatta...

I'd have preferred the book be filmed as it WAS - oral history and all. Have Pitt be the narrator connecting the stories.

But that's not how Hollywood works.

Which is why fans of the book are ticked.

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The Narrator of WWZ did work for the UN and Brad Pitt's character works for the UN. So that's in common so far.

Many times Hollywood will buy a script option, work on it, realize its not working on a technical level, pay out big bucks on rewrites, it's stillnot working, payout more money, and suddenly the movie doesn't look like it was originally intended. But if they decide to drop a project or even rename it, you're dealing with penalties all over the place--actors, screenwriters, producers, directors, licensees, etc.--could potentially get paid out because the project "failed" and they were contracted. With Pitt throwing his full support behind this movie (his production company is involved, he's not just the actor here) who knows what kind of deals were made behind the scenes.

Didn't read the book, but the trailer leaves me feeling 'meh.'

I see no sign of Kondo (nor Tomonaga). K was by far my favorite character in Z.

I haven't read the book so I have no frame of reference for those fans, but if you're looking for a summer flick... This is it. It's high-energy all the way through, funny in places and everyone, including Brad, gives a good performance. The third act had a lot of problems in production and they brought in a lot of people to fix it up and while it's still not perfect, they avoided some cliches that I think could have befallen a lesser film.

A girl I talked to after I saw it last night said she loves horror, loves zombies, but hasn't like a zombie movie since 28 Days Later. Don't get me wrong, it won't change your life, but it delivers on what you'd expect it to.

Edit: Entertainment Weekly just gave this an A-

I didn't read the book. Maybe if I had, my opinion might be different, but I thought this was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time, a real roller coaster ride. When the movie was over, the guy sitting next to me says, "Well, that really sucked." I'm guessing he was a fan of the book. I'm curious to hear what others think of it.

I'll try to judge it based off its own merits rather than the merits of the book!

They butchered WWZ, it's WWZ in name only

Meh...it's average. I would say it's a typical summer action movie, but most summer action movies were more substantial. An okay way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

And nothing like the book at all, which I read 2 1/2 years ago, so I'd forgotten a lot about it anyway.

I thought they did a great job with this. It's more prequel than the book, but has a lot of nods to the different elements in the book, which was awesome. It actually followed the spirit of the book incredibly well, and I think they did a fantastic job with it. Even the couple of rather major plot points that were changed could still make sense in the frame of the book. That's one of the things that's interesting, I think. The book is such a huge story. It's worldwide, filled with individual stories rather than one person's story, which leaves it wide open. That means that, to me, it didn't ring untrue at all.

It's also not very gory, which I have to say I enjoyed. I like the Walking Dead, but I dislike how graphic they get. Part of what is amazing about the book is that it's a zombie story without the usual zombie movie tropes. It isn't scary because people are chewing each other's intestines, but because of the sheer scale of things and because you can feel the grains of truth in it. I'm explaining this badly, but I really enjoyed the book.

Similarly, this isn't a movie about zombies in the Night of the Living Dead sense. I thought they did a fantastic job of generating suspense and keeping it scary without needing to show a ton of blood and guts.

I don't know, overall I was happy with it. I just reread the book a month ago because I wanted it to be fresh in my mind. I went into this knowing it was going to be very different and planning to enjoy it as its own thing, but I think they captured the spirit very well.

I was pleasantly surprised by the movie as well. I was really impressed by the CG that was used in the antpile shot as well as some of the crowd scenes, and yet I didn't feel like they went overboard on CG either. When they needed it they held nothing back. When they didn't, they left it out.

I was also acutely aware of the lengths they went to in order to avoid showing anything really gory. Sometimes it was subtle, sometimes not so subtle, but it left the movie at PG-13 instead of R, which was a really sharp business move.

I wasn't a huge fan of the book. It was well written and parts of it were interesting but telling a horror/suspense tale from a the point of view of survivors in short segments undermined my abilty to experience the scarey moments with the characters. Maybe thats just me.

That's interesting. I didn't see the book as a suspense/horror, though I guess it was. I will say I couldn't put it down, either time I read it, which surprised me. While the suspense was episodic, there was a sense of "how on earth do you get out of this?"

Saw it last night.

I liked it. I thought it was very tense (but then, I'm easily entertained and give it all over to whatever I'm watching). I was also surprised by how little gore there was and how it focused on the spread of the infection as the horror rather than carnage.

Surprisingly, there was a lot of laughing in my sold-out showing. Weird.

I heard a rumor that when they first ran the movie by a focus group, it got such a negative response that they had to reshoot the ending... Now that it's come out, has there been any talk of what the original ending had been?

I liked it, as well. It had lots of moments that made me think and was very suspenseful. And it had enough zombie action to entertain my 12 year old son and his friend, too.

heza said:

Saw it last night.

I liked it. I thought it was very tense (but then, I'm easily entertained and give it all over to whatever I'm watching). I was also surprised by how little gore there was and how it focused on the spread of the infection as the horror rather than carnage.

Surprisingly, there was a lot of laughing in my sold-out showing. Weird.

I heard a rumor that when they first ran the movie by a focus group, it got such a negative response that they had to reshoot the ending... Now that it's come out, has there been any talk of what the original ending had been?

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Yeah, you can look up what the original ending was.

Alternate ending: http://www.movies.com/movie-news/world-war-z-original-ending/12638

kaitie said:

That's interesting. I didn't see the book as a suspense/horror, though I guess it was. I will say I couldn't put it down, either time I read it, which surprised me. While the suspense was episodic, there was a sense of "how on earth do you get out of this?"

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Yeah, WWZ isn't really a suspense or horror novel.

It's more of a...historical documentary zombie plague book. Which, you know, has PARTS that can be considered scary...but that really wasn't the goal of the book...

I was just thinking about it, and part of what's interesting about the way they changed things up for the movie is that it takes away some of the more controversial aspects.

(Book spoilers below)

A lot of the stuff in the book about how they actually dealt with the zombies was, on the surface, less than moral. They were in a situation where they had to choose the lesser of two evils. The fact that the main way people managed to come back was by leaving certain survivors to fend for themselves so they'd act as bait, for instance. That they'd try to get the people they deemed most important (doctors, scientists, etc.) to safety at the expense of the others. The scenes in India where they bombed thousands of survivors who were trying to get away.

Everyone knew that it was terrible to let people die and that humanity should be trying to save every last one because they were at such a low point, but at the same time, they recognized that doing so would cause them to all be lost.

It's an uncomfortable element of the book. One that makes you think and you aren't sure how to feel about it. I can't see things like that going over well in a movie. It would completely change the feeling of the movie to deal with that sort of serious moral question, and I imagine a lot of people just wouldn't have enjoyed it.

Anyway, I'm just happy with how they did it, but I do think that's part of the reason they changed certain elements.

As someone who 1) hasn't read the book (but it's in my queue) and 2) isn't a fan of serious zombie movies (I prefer Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland), I can honestly say I really enjoyed this movie. I liked that the focus was on the survivors more than the zombies and it wasn't loaded down with gore or gruesome scenes. The pure numbers of the undead were enough to impress how bad things were without sitting a couple of zombies down and having them gnaw on some dude's intestines.

I can absolutely understand what you say about the book not being horror/suspense, Zoombie, and I think they kept true to that at least, even if there's not much else in common.

Incredibly disjointed. You could see the seams where they joined the chunks together after each rewrite. I also felt it was extremely generic: each scene felt like I had watched it before, because just about every scene was ripped from another movie. Sometimes in a hilari-bad way, like the Jerusalem scene of zombies swarming the walls like the bugs in Starship Troopers.

I haven't read the book.

The zombies are supposed to be slow.

It wasn't too bad. Had absolutely nothing--nothing--to do with the book. I thought at first the globetrotting would offer nods to the book's various protags/heroes/etc., but instead it felt more like a rip off of Dan Brown (go to A and conveniently meet someone who will direct you to B, where another conveniently located signpost character will give you directions to C). And along the way stupid human tricks will cause you no end of harm (the ill-timed phone call was my favorite...our theatre gave up a collective groan).

Had I never heard of World War Z and this movie was my first exposure to it, I would have been okay with it. It was goofy and OTT and had way way way too many plotholes large enough to trap all the zombies in, but, heh, we're in a heat wave here and it was nice and cold and dark in the theatre.

It was OK. It had a lot of excitement and scary action moments. It lacked the connection with the characters from something like The Walking Dead, or even Shaun of the Dead.

I enjoyed it, and didn't question the logic holes too much until much later, and that's all I really ask of a summer action blockbuster.

JohnnyGottaKeyboard said:

It wasn't too bad. Had absolutely nothing--nothing--to do with the book. I thought at first the globetrotting would offer nods to the book's various protags/heroes/etc., but instead it felt more like a rip off of Dan Brown (go to A and conveniently meet someone who will direct you to B, where another conveniently located signpost character will give you directions to C). And along the way stupid human tricks will cause you no end of harm (the ill-timed phone call was my favorite...our theatre gave up a collective groan).

Had I never heard of World War Z and this movie was my first exposure to it, I would have been okay with it. It was goofy and OTT and had way way way too many plotholes large enough to trap all the zombies in, but, heh, we're in a heat wave here and it was nice and cold and dark in the theatre.

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That's just about exactly my impression too. (Went to see it this morning.)

One of the reasons the book works so well is, the mysterious virus involved almost seems possible. At least, it's realistic in taking a while -- a day or more -- to sicken a person and kill him (before reanimating him as a zombie). In the movie, it takes literally less than ten seconds, start to finish, and then you've got a zombie exactly like in the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake -- runs like a track star, and for some reason screeches like a panther.

Running zombies are inherently less scary than proper, George Romero-type zombies. Don't understand it as an artistic choice.

But, it was an effective thriller.