Ryan McNeilFour years ago, my friend Beth wouldn’t stop raving about a book and told me that I must read it. She was right – as she tends to be – I read it and loved it. By now you can probably guess that the book was Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.
Shortly after I tore through it, I discovered that it was on tap to be made into a movie. Well, the movie has almost arrived…but it ain’t really based on that book.
And you know what? That’s alright.
For as long as there have been movies and books there has been the phrase “The book was better”. By and large that will be the rule more than the exception because of the radical difference in the medium. So even if this film goes on to become a cultural phenomenon, I’ll say it here and now: if any part of you digs zombies, you owe it to yourself to read this book.
Beyond that false start, there’s something else that can be seen in this trailer that I know will get purists’ dander up: the zombies are running. Now you might have a preference between fast zombies and slow zombies, and a theory on whether fast zombies can even be called zombies. But you have to admit – the final visual in this trailer is a pretty damned cool visual…and probably not a visual that would have worked with the slow-moving variety.
Now if you’ve read this far you might be screaming at your monitor about how wrong I am for a litany of reasons. To that I leave you with this:
This trailer isn’t a remake, a reboot, a prequel, or a sequel. It isn’t based on a TV show, a comic book, a board game or a toy. Doesn’t that alone count for something?
If you are trying to insinuate that World War Z is going to be something original, you are greatly mistaken.
If there is anything World War Z has going for it, it’s that it does not look AT ALL like a zombie movie.
Either way, I’m skipping this, because zombies peaked years ago.
I’m not saying it’s going to be the most original…I’m just suggesting that we’ve reached a point where a film that isn’t a property already gets bonus marks for not trying to feed off nostalgia or familiarity.
If anything has peaked and overstayed it’s welcome, it’s the vampire franchise. I have high hopes for this movie BECAUSE it doesn’t look like a typical zombie movie. Besides, Brad Pitt’s acting resume is flawless; the man doesn’t choose a bad movie.
Yeah – if nothing else, it looks like a fun action film. Now looks could well be deceiving, but I’m willing to gamble the price of admission on it.
This trailer isn’t a remake, a reboot, a prequel, or a sequel. It isn’t based on a TV show, a comic book, a board game or a toy. Doesn’t that alone count for something?
Hey, I love good, original stories, but it’s so much more important for a story to be smartly crafted and well told. Originality– which in the case of World War Z generously translates to, “not being based on an existing property”– only gets a film so far, I think, and the problems I have with this trailer have nothing to do with the fact that it’s Generic Zombie Apocalypse Story #1,000,000.
It looks terrible. The CGI is horrid– enough that any suggestions that it can be fixed in post just sound like blind optimism– and, honestly, it’s there to let the studio get away with a PG-13 rating. When your zombies are represented by a churning swarm of indiscernible humanoid forms, you can drop a few living people in their path and just have them get run over without having to show off how ugly that really is. Meanwhile, in The Walking Dead, we see characters get gruesomely devoured alive by three or four zombies.
There’s a clear sense that this is being made for 13-year-old-boys who play XBox LIVE all day long. They need a soft rating to get into the theater, so the studio accommodates by making an antiseptic film. Hell, it’s nearly impossible to read the zombies as zombies; if we didn’t know what the movie was based on, and if the title was different, we might all be guessing what the hordes of [things] really are. So this is good, clean, toothless zombie “fun”.
If I ever get a press screening of it, and I will, I’ll watch it. But I have almost no faith in its chances for quality.
I’d wager that judging its effects at this stage is premature, since it’s quite likely that its effects aren’t entirely finished yet. Marvel films have gone through that in the past with early glimpses at Hulk.
As for its violence, don’t be dissuaded by a PG-13 rating. Curiously, the MPAA has a massive tolerance for violence, and lets a lot of stuff fly. Hell, the very first PG-13 film had a character’s heart getting ripped out of his chest! The fact that The Walking Dead is allowed to be shown on television with how gruesome it can get is a sign that censors are letting more and more pass.
The only thing that really ratchets up an R rating in their eyes is deep-red blood…and given that zombies don’t do a whole lot of bleeding, it’s easy to see how that too might have passed the muster.
Try to find *a little* faith mate…the end result could surprise us all.
The PG-13 rating is one thing, the zombies are another. My problem isn’t so much to do with concern over there being too little bloodshed for my tastes, but rather with character deaths being so antiseptic as to be meaningless. When you drop a person into a roiling mass of zombies, they just disappear. When a character dies in The Walking Dead, they get chewed apart. There’s a difference in how those deaths impact us, and I get the distinct feeling from this trailer that the film we’ll be watching will be low-impact. If it is, that’s a strike.
FX being what they are, I’m willing to give the CGI another chance in theaters, sure. But it looks THAT BAD right now that I can’t really see it looking that much better in the finished film, even if there’s a strong likelihood that they can be fixed in post.
I’m with Andrew on this one. I desperately wanted the makers of this film to do it right and treat this as if it were a documentary. That would have been a new and interesting way to do a zombie film, much like the book was a new and interesting way to tell a zombie story.
The fact that it isn’t a remake, etc. is, in fact, a significant weakness of a film that is ostensibly based on a book. I’d think that the filmmakers and the audience would want it to be, y’know, based on the book. It’s almost as if they wrote a story vaguely zombie-ish and then just bought a name familiar to enough geeks and zombiphiles to get some buzz.
And NO zombie film should be rated PG-13. Ever.
Not interested, and that makes me sad.
I too would have loved to have seen the film go the documentary route to mirror the tone of the book. Maybe if someone had convinced Neil Blomkamp to take this on as a follow-up to DISTRICT 9, we’d have had something.
Again, there’s nothing to say that the action won’t be intercut with documentary style interviews…it’s just a trailer, after all.
I don’t think we can say a whole lot in terms of its story structure and how it compares to the book until we watch it. For all we know it follows the plot of the novel rather closely. Then again, you could be totally right and this could be a complete bastardization.
yep, the zombies coming in swarms and running like Speedy Gonzales got me scared too and I almost screamed from fear the first time I saw the trailer. It should be an interesting film, I’m not the one who will watch it for gore and action, since I don’t like that, but for the psychological aspect of how people deal in such situations and what kind of dilemmas and choices they’re faced with, the same reason I watch THE WALKING DEAD 🙂