Okay, I'm just going to start with that I had not read the original novel I haven been told by many that it is very enjoyable. I have also been told, ever since the first trailers popped up, that it was going to be nothing like the original novel. Since I didn't read the source material, I had no real attachment. I will say that I was very skeptic of it being any good when I first walked in. Trailer had bad CGI, it was pretty scattered, and the action sequences seemed very typical. I will say that if you want to see a faithful adaption of the book, I've been told this movie is not for you (of course, whenever is there going to be a true faithful adaption of anything). After watching it, I was completely impressed with what they did. Yes, the CGI wasn't the greatest, and the action did nothing too big for me, but that wasn't something that bothered me. It was the story that really drew me in. That short time where Brad Pitt is with his family got me invested both in him and in the family. The movie made sure to make time for me to actually give a damn about the main character, which is something action movies ever do. It was also clever in getting around the whole zombie issue. It wasn't just gun wielding and running. There were actually some places where they used their brains. Also, with it being PG-13, they were really creative in some of the more "gory" parts. I will say that the parts that made me cringe didn't have any zombies in the scenes (although they were pretty creepy at points). Spoiler The entire third act had me really invested. Going through the B wing was the most intense moment of the film for me. And when they said that only a disease could help the humans in camouflaging against the zombies, I pretty much guessed the ending, but it was still amazing to watch. It was really something that I hadn't seen in zombie lore, and I felt that it made sense with what they had established prior.
So Creature, I have one question before I get into this proper: Did they at least keep the scene in the book where the US army blasts the song "The Trooper" on loud speakers to attract the zombie hoard to gun them down?
Well it not having that just kinda dropped my interest in it by a large margin. Anyway, I'm sad they didn't try to adapt the book proper, it had such potential to be a great movie if they did. From what I've seen in trailers they seem to instead make it the run-of-the-mill zombie/race-against-time action thriller where the U.N employee is the reluctant hero who must overcome insurmountable odds to save the world (and just maybe... the woman he loves) rather then it being about a UN employee interviewing survivors of the war about the zombie apocalypse and their experiences and explore why the world wasn't prepared to deal with the zombie hoards. If there is one thing I will say about this movie it looks like it does show you when shit hits the fan, something I will always like because almost every apocalypse movie out has the main character being asleep or something while it goes on. But again, they could have shown that in an interview story telling style of World War Z, just have a survivor tell how things went in the Great Panic. And don't say that wouldn't work because it freakin' would.
From what I've learned in watching movies is never trust the trailers (or Rotten Tomatoes, but that's beside the point). Trailers will always lie to you; they goal of the trailer is to get butts in the seat. The way Hollywood is now, the directors, producers, film creators have no say on what will be put in the trailer. It is done by film executives who just want people to see the film, therefore, a lot of things will be messed with to get people to expect something very different than the final product. I say all that because it's your latter description that was more like the film. He is recruited to go around the world to discover how it all actually started. While there's no real interviewing, there is plenty of investigation. And the reason he's doing it is to make sure that his family is out of harms way (if he didn't cooperate, his family would be kicked off the sub where there is no zombies and be put in a refugee camp on land where there is always a chance of getting infected).
That's very true. The thing is however, the book takes place after the war and humanity won. The point of the book wasn't about the zombies or where the outbreak came from, it was about the people and the experiences they had. It's about an agent of the UN's Postwar Commission who goes around the world to interview survivors of the zombie apocalypse in order to understand exactly how it happened. He's just a researcher trying to unearth facts that the UN might not want to get out whilst making sense of this big, bloody, global mess. The writer, Max Brooks, has said it was inspired by The Good War, a book which was about the accounts of people from World War II and how it effected them. Compare it with the movie, we have Brad Pitt who gets recruited for some reason (why him specifically?) to go and investigate the source of the virus or else his family might be put in danger. If anything my former description is more accurate.
I walked into the film expecting a poorly-made zombie film whose target audience is made up of teenage boys and Brad Pitt-loving women. This really did blow my expectations out of the water in the sense that I thoroughly enjoyed the story. The few jump scares in the beginning got me, they did more than just shoot zombies and run from the hoards, and Brad Pitt was surprisingly good. The worst thing imo had to be Spoiler the wife (I can't remember her name, but yeah). In the beginning, she seemed capable and strong-willed, but they utterly butchered that part of her character once they reached safety. I can understand that she would be concerned for the fate of her husband and the father of their children, but GODDAMMIT THAT DOESN'T MEAN YOU JUST HAVE TO BE THE WEEPING WIFE. I agree with tummer that the last third of the film was the best, and though the end was predictable - due largely to the continuity in the story, which I thoroughly appreciated - I did enjoy the way it played out. If I had to rate it, I'd give it a solid 7.5/10
I've just got back from watching it and I thought I was going to be bored, but I wasn't. It was a really good film and apart from a few 'It's a film which is why it worked' I felt the story felt 'real'. Another thing that effected the film in a bad way was the camera work, it was too shaky. Spoiler I didn't think she was too weepy, in fact due to what was going on I think her actions were real
