World War Z
Nov. 10th, 2012 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonlettuceThanks to soupytwist, I've just discovered that the first trailer for World War Z has been released: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/11/first-world-war-z-footage
No, no, no. Just whole entire world of no.
For anyone who has never read World War Z, there's a reason I am very much DO NOT WANT with this, even though I think WWZ is a brilliant and fantastically written book. (Also, there are most likely to be book spoilers in here, so be warned.)
WWZ was written by Max Brooks, the same guy who wrote The Zombie Survival Guide. Now, TZSG is kind of humorously cracktatic, so I picked up WWZ expecting some of the same. Yeah, I was wrong on that one.
WWZ is written as a set of interviews carried out with survivors after the war is over. If you sidestep the fact that the war was with zombies, it's a beautifully written piece of work that manages to be uplifting, dark, hopeful and gut-wrenchingly painful at the same time, because it's a book about surviving, and all the issues that come with that. It's not played for laughs; it's played that these are the people who went through a war and managed to come out of the other side. And some of those peoples' stories are painful to read. This is the book that had me in tears when I was reading it on the way into work. (As an aside, people look at you slightly funny when you're crying at a book and they realize it's a zombie novel.)
When I first heard they were talking about turning WWZ into a movie my first thought was 'Awesome!' and my second thought, immediately after, was 'Oh god, please don't fuck it up.'
Well, watching that trailer, I gotta say, yeah, they fucked it up.
What I just watched was 27 seconds of a generic zombie movie with running and brain-nomming waves of zombies and only Brad Pitt can save the world, omg!
But the book is so much more than that. The book is the interview with a teenager as she goes around after the winter thaw calmly chopping the heads off any zombies that got stuck in the frost, because that's how her life is now. The book is talking to a soldier who escaped from an infested forest because someone on her comm talked her through her way out when she was ready to give in and die. The book is the conversation with a guy whose mind has divorced itself from reality because he can't accept that he was the one who came up with a plan to save thousands of people by leaving in elderly and infirm as bait so the rest of them can escape. (Seriously, that's the part of the book that hit me the most, I think. It's written amazingly.)
I'm hoping I'm wrong. I'm hoping the bits they chose to be representative of the movie were just really bad choices and this isn't going to be generic zombie movie #4,237. I'm hoping, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to be disappointed.
soupytwist, I've just discovered that the first trailer for World War Z has been released: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/11/first-world-war-z-footageNo, no, no. Just whole entire world of no.
For anyone who has never read World War Z, there's a reason I am very much DO NOT WANT with this, even though I think WWZ is a brilliant and fantastically written book. (Also, there are most likely to be book spoilers in here, so be warned.)
WWZ was written by Max Brooks, the same guy who wrote The Zombie Survival Guide. Now, TZSG is kind of humorously cracktatic, so I picked up WWZ expecting some of the same. Yeah, I was wrong on that one.
WWZ is written as a set of interviews carried out with survivors after the war is over. If you sidestep the fact that the war was with zombies, it's a beautifully written piece of work that manages to be uplifting, dark, hopeful and gut-wrenchingly painful at the same time, because it's a book about surviving, and all the issues that come with that. It's not played for laughs; it's played that these are the people who went through a war and managed to come out of the other side. And some of those peoples' stories are painful to read. This is the book that had me in tears when I was reading it on the way into work. (As an aside, people look at you slightly funny when you're crying at a book and they realize it's a zombie novel.)
When I first heard they were talking about turning WWZ into a movie my first thought was 'Awesome!' and my second thought, immediately after, was 'Oh god, please don't fuck it up.'
Well, watching that trailer, I gotta say, yeah, they fucked it up.
What I just watched was 27 seconds of a generic zombie movie with running and brain-nomming waves of zombies and only Brad Pitt can save the world, omg!
But the book is so much more than that. The book is the interview with a teenager as she goes around after the winter thaw calmly chopping the heads off any zombies that got stuck in the frost, because that's how her life is now. The book is talking to a soldier who escaped from an infested forest because someone on her comm talked her through her way out when she was ready to give in and die. The book is the conversation with a guy whose mind has divorced itself from reality because he can't accept that he was the one who came up with a plan to save thousands of people by leaving in elderly and infirm as bait so the rest of them can escape. (Seriously, that's the part of the book that hit me the most, I think. It's written amazingly.)
I'm hoping I'm wrong. I'm hoping the bits they chose to be representative of the movie were just really bad choices and this isn't going to be generic zombie movie #4,237. I'm hoping, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to be disappointed.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-11 02:49 am (UTC)One of the stories you mention, the soldier who escaped because of the mysterious comm voice, haunts me to this day, and the format of the book is brilliant. I can only hope that the movie ends up being better than this, but yeah, the nature of the zombies, as suggested in the trailer, is so very wrong for the story that my hopes are very dim. It may end up being a ripping yarn, but it's waaaaay too much "White Guy Saves The World and his Female Family" as it appears now. Sigh.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-11 07:35 pm (UTC)