{"id":4486,"date":"2013-08-30T15:08:39","date_gmt":"2013-08-30T23:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/?p=4486"},"modified":"2013-09-01T12:03:35","modified_gmt":"2013-09-01T20:03:35","slug":"zombie-apocalypse-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/30\/zombie-apocalypse-now-4486\/","title":{"rendered":"Zombie Apocalypse Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve got zombies on the brains. Nothing fills me with a giddier sense of dread than the shambling undead, an adrenaline rush for this old black-clad goth. So of course I read Max Brooks\u2019s Zombie Survival Guide<\/em>, a droll, tongue-in-cheek Let’s Go: Zombieland<\/em>. It was good fun and a clever idea, but largely unmemorable, the writing not particularly noteworthy. So when Brooks published his novel, World War Z<\/em>, I wrote it off as capitalizing on his famous name. (His dad is Mel Brooks.) Then I read it, and was floored.<\/p>\n

\"brooks_books\"<\/p>\n

Apparently Brad Pitt saw what I saw, because he immediately bought the movie rights. And then the wait began. I read about delays in the movie\u2019s release, scenes reshot and storylines reworked until it threatened to rival Apocalypse Now\u2019s production woes. I didn\u2019t care. I just didn\u2019t want them to eff it up. But they did, big time.<\/p>\n

The book recounts personal experiences of surviving the Zombie Wars, a decade-long struggle fought inch by inch worldwide by individuals from all walks of life, the stories gathered after the fact by a nameless UN representative. Brooks actually included a sly reference to his first book, stating that \u201cThe civilian survival guide helped, but was still severely limited\u2026. You could see it was clearly written by an American, the references to SUVs and personal firearms.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Brad

Brad Pitt in World War Z<\/p><\/div>\n

But memoirs about a protracted war don\u2019t suit Hollywood, apparently. Instead, the UN guy, now morphed on-screen into something like a benevolent mercenary played by–surprise!–Pitt himself hits the ground running as the plague breaks and within days identifies the magic bullet that will end the war: A vaccine of sorts, an approach that was tried unsuccessfully in the book but failed as a \u201cfalse miracle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why take this ten-year shortcut in the movie adaptation? Brooks said it best through his character Travis D\u2019Ambrosia, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe: \u201cAmerica is a very all-or-nothing society. We like the big win, the touchdown, the knockout in the first round.\u201d Pitt\u2019s voiced-over epilogue concedes that the war was not over “by a long shot,” but still.<\/p>\n

Brooks\u2019s methodical research on the \u201chistory of fixed fortifications,\u201d politics and religion and his canny extrapolation to facing an undead foe was scrapped, as was all but a few snippets of dialog. Even that was sugar-coated. \u201cEvery zombie besieging those survivors will be one less zombie throwing itself against our defenses,\u201d the words of the \u201cdemented apartheid war criminal\u201d Redeker, whose plan to sacrifice thousands to save millions was implemented world-wide became, \u201cevery person we save is one less zombie we have to fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s fascinating psychological angle didn\u2019t make the cut. That includes quislings (not to be confused with Oz’s Quadlings)–\u201cpeople that went nutballs and started acting like zombies,\u201d named after infamous Norwegian Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling–as well as ADS, \u201cAsymptomatic Demise Syndrome\u201d or \u201cApocalyptic Despair Syndrome,\u201d where people simply give up, going to sleep and not waking up.<\/p>\n

\"Left:<\/a>

Left: Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonss\u00f8n Quisling; Right: Quadlings<\/p><\/div>\n

Of course there was no room for personal stories, beyond endless scenes establishing that Pitt loves his family. No room for Kondo Tatsumi, the otaku<\/em> (outsider) who evolves from a weakling who spent all his waking hours immersed in cyberspace to become a katana<\/em>-wielding warrior, or for Tomonaga Ijiro, blinded by the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki, who remains after Japan\u2019s evacuation as its caretaker.<\/p>\n

One of the most glaring omissions was the narrative of brave Colonel Christina Eliopolis, whose plane went down in \u201coccupied territory.\u201d It was as though during discussions about what must be included in the movie someone said \u201cthe female fighter pilot,\u201d and \u201cgirl [sic] soldier\u201d was scrawled on the whiteboard. They ended up with Segen, an Israeli soldier who, in her own words, was nothing but a liability. To use Col. Eliopolis\u2019s phrase, they screwed the pooch on that one.<\/p>\n

Perhaps much of this wouldn\u2019t have translated well\u2014or at least easily\u2014to the big screen, but there was plenty of action that should have been salvaged: The snafu at the Battle of Yonkers, and how the army finally got it right in Hope, New Mexico with Iron Maiden\u2019s \u201cThe Trooper\u201d blasting in their helmets. The claustrophobic fighting in the tunnels under Paris, or in the fog, set to a Smiths soundtrack. The cat-and-mouse chase between two rogue Chinese submarines. Lobo(tomizer)-wielding grunts.<\/p>\n

\"World

World War Z<\/p><\/div>\n

What was left? A big-budget zombie flick–really just another zombie flick–and not a particularly scary one. George Romero got it right: lumbering corpses are scary, and in Brooks\u2019s book, \u201cthe living dead were slow and easy to outrun or even outwalk.\u201d I watched \u201cDespicable Me 2\u201d with my kids a few weeks after seeing WWZ. As a swarm of mutated minion poured around a corner (spoilers don\u2019t count in cartoons) it struck me how closely it resembled the sprinting zombie horde in the WWZ movie. Running zombies look like a bunch of made-up extras, and CGIed running zombies just look cartoonish.<\/p>\n

Read Brooks\u2019s World War Z<\/em> because–surprise!–the book is immeasurably better than the movie. Then go back and enjoy his Zombie Survival Guide<\/em>, and gobble up anything else he decides to write.<\/p>\n

Michael Singman-Aste
\nPostdiluvian Photo<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve got zombies on the brains. Nothing fills me with a giddier sense of dread than the shambling undead, an adrenaline rush for this old black-clad goth. So of course I read Max Brooks\u2019s Zombie Survival Guide, a droll, tongue-in-cheek Let’s Go: Zombieland. It was good fun and a clever idea, but largely unmemorable, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[192],"class_list":["post-4486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-zombies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pPxQO-1am","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4486"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4536,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4486\/revisions\/4536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}