World War Z Shuffles Away From Being True to the Novel
World War Z is not your traditional zombie story. Max Brooks managed to create a real and vibrant world where zombie hordes took humanity by surprise in blood and gore and fear. The book is a collection of interviews from a United Nations worker taken after the rise of the zombies and the slow defeat of the undead hordes by the remaining survivors.
Max Brooks’ imaginative story chronicles the response of the zombie epidemic including the use of controversial methods in South Africa and Israel and how ill prepared governments were when faced with such a fast moving pandemic. Both a commentary on society and an exploration at what it means to be human, World War Z is threw traditional zombie conventions out the window.
Paramount with director Marc Forster is tasked with the chore of bringing this book to the big screen. Zombie aficionados are a tenacious bunch valuing being true to the story over the over use of gore and what many see as Hollywood perversion. Unfortunately, it would seem that the Hollywood perversion has happened which has fanboys and gals in an uproar.
An official synopsis of the upcoming World War Z movie has been released and it is just as many feared. Paramount has taken a perfectly good story with its unorthodox method of story-telling and watered it down into the tired zombie conventions.
“The story revolves around United Nations employee, Gerry Lane (Pitt) who traverses the world in a race against time to stop the Zombie pandemic from toppling armies and governments and threatening to decimate humanity itself.”
Fans were hoping that the movie would stay true to Brooks’ format. In the novel the zombie catastrophe has already happened. Armies were toppled, governments shattered, and humanity very nearly decimated. This was the most interesting part of the novel; the fact that the zombies won. The survivors had to rally together in a joint international effort to eradicate the roaming hordes from Earth’s landmass. Decades after the outbreak people are just now beginning to reshape their world which is drastically different from pre-Zedhead conditions.
The synopsis seems to place us in the beginnings of the Zombie War.
Sure, fans might get to see a first-hand account of the Battle of Yonkers but at the cost of some magnificent story telling. Fans were hoping to see flashbacks, to meet the people so transformed by the war, and to get that same perspective that is gained through the book. Now, it appears that World War Z is going to follow the same style of all those other zombie movies that have recently flooded the market.
World War Z set the traditional zombie tale on it’s head which made it such a fantastic tale. This perversion of the story is not going to sit well with the fans and hopefully Paramount realizes this before it’s too late.
