Last night I saw the preview for the World War Z movie. Brad Pitt is the star. The special efffects looked amazing! After reading and discussing the book I think I may go see the movie. Johnson, did you know about this? Can't remember when it comes out though.

Yeah,

Here's the thread i put up where i speak on it a bit.

http://www.booktalk.org/world-war-z-mov ... 13442.html

Basically, i think it looks like a good and interesting zombie movie, but it doesn't remind me of WWZ at all, except the huge scale of it.

I'll watch it, but i'm not expecting to see WWZ.

Never saw this post. I agree with you. The problem I see is the movie seems to have been created for your typical zombie lover where the book was not. Because of this the meaning of the book may be lost and the movie may just be another lets kill zombies action thriller. The best way to recreate this novel on film may be a fictional documentary. The previe looks like the movie is based heavily on only one perspective.

Well.... The book is based on a single perspective also -- that of the person collecting the interviews -- an employee of the United Nations Postwar Commission Report. Somewhere (can't seem to find it now), I read the opinion that all the interviews are in the "same voice", which I understood to mean that the book would've been better if the author had done a better job of giving each of the interviewees their own unique voice.

According to the Wikipedia page about the movie, the Brad Pitt character in the movie represents the interview collector (i.e., the narrator) from the book. The book provides very little information about the narrator as a person. My impression is that the movie provides more personal detail about the narrator in order to give the viewer a central character to identify with (see the Straczynski quote below).

wikipedia wrote: The screenplay was written by Babylon 5 and Rising Stars creator J. Michael Straczynski, who identified the challenge in adapting the work as "creating a main character out of a book that reads as a UN Report on the zombie wars".

...

In an interview with Fangoria, Brooks (the author of the book) said, "I can't give it away, but Straczynski found a way to tie it all together. The last draft I read was amazing."

A clear difference between the book and the movie is that the book describes interviews collected after the war. The movie apparently is about the narrator's activity during the war attempting to help the war effort:

wikipedia wrote:As a zombie pandemic traverses the globe, United Nations employee Gerry Lane (Pitt) travels the world trying to find a way to stop the pandemic that is defeating armies and collapsing governments as they try to prevent social collapse.

So, I think there will be some difference between the book and the movie, but I think they may be closer in spirit than is clear from the trailer.

I thought he did a good job having the interviews sound different from one another in the book. Where i sometimes got lost is when he would re-visit a character, then 2 pages into that second part of the interview i would say to myself "OH! This is the guy who fought at Yonkers!" and then it would start to make more sense to me.

I did find that to be a problem, but the interview format and the multiple perspectives made it possible to see everything that happened around the world during the war.

In the movie we are losing this broad perspective and instead seeing only what one man sees.

Fast zombies. Fast zombies are good, but Max Brooks' book doesn't have fast zombies. That sounds like a trifling change, less impact than changing the perspective from interviews to run and gun action movie, but it really isn't.

So much of the book has to do with dealing with the specific threat of traditional zombies that changing them so radically undermines huge swaths of the book. Not only are the zombies in this movie fast, they are supernaturally agile and fast. Running right up the backs of other zombies, over busses, and surging around corners like a wave.

Now think about the book and how people dealt with the zombies. The blind japanese gardener can't have survived in the movie. The lobo, or just about any other melee weapon is just about useless against these tidal waves of zombies. How is the re-enforced square going to hold up against this surging smear of CG bodies? That was the entire basis of how they took back america!

Get set up, make sure you have supplies, makes sound, let the zombies come to you, pick them off with head shots. That tactic is not going to be very effective in this movie.

It just isn't the same story.

They should have made this movie. This exact same movie, and named it something else. Don't use "world war Z" if you aren't making World War Z.

Wow, you're right. I didn't realize the movie involved fast zombies. That really does make it a different story. Well, shoot.