World War Z: The CGI action adventure

I couldn't find a thread for this... and we had such a fun time arguing over the book at that other place.

The trailer is out:
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount/worldwarz/

And apart from the sound it sucks.
Fast CGI zombies with planned wall scaling tactics are even worse than the stuff some of us hated in the book.

Yes it's awful and it's going to be awful. I would rather watch Resident Evil 5. To be fair, there was never any chance of it being a good movie. Ten part mini-series probably would have done it justice.

Alright, let me play Devil's Advocate for a minute.

I love the book and think they should have stuck with the source material. They obviously didn't. But I've seen worse looking movies. While the trailer wasn't what I expected from a WWZ movie, it still looked fairly interesting - just skip the preconceptions.

Sorry. I cannot abide running zombies.

And why are they intelligent enough to pick a single point of a wall to pile up against?

Love the large scale military stuff, but it looks like some sort of Resident Evil monster-action movie and not WWZ.

I'm with Blackadar. It doesn't fit the source material, but I like their take on fast zombies not so much as a swarm, but as a relentless tide. There were a bunch of shots, like them running over the overturning bus, or running down the staircase in the alleyway, that were just unstoppable waves made out of human bodies. That hit some "holy shit" nerve with me.

While I was kind of hoping for a movie like Shoah that just happened to be about a zombie apocalypse, I wasn't ever seriously expecting that to happen. This doesn't look terrible to me, just not like the book.

I've never read the book (though I want to now) but the trailer looked fine to me. Well, mostly fine - some of the CGI looks a bit dodgy and I'm a little bit burned out on zombies, but I would give this a go based on that trailer.

I've got no attachment to the book and no real preference in the fast vs. slow zombies "debate." What annoys me is that the trailer looks like they took The Day After Tomorrow and replaced "water" with "animated zombie body."

It looks too fake and so obviously computer-generated for it to register as real for even half a second.

Real question from my household after seeing the trailer: "Are they fighting ant people, or zombies?"

That seemed okay. The zombies-as-wave thing wasn't nearly as off-putting as the comments led me to expect.

No, it was horrible.

I haven't read the book, I just remember it being summed up as "blind monk with a shovel is more effective vs zombies than an entire army," so at first I thought it looked like an ok fast zombie movie. Then I got to the part with the zombies rolling over each other in the alleyway towards the camera and was like "Well, yeah, that was pretty dumb and impossible looking, but maybe people are overreacting a little." Then I got to the last shot and the stupidity and bad cgi of them assaulting the wall just blew my mind. Apparently now becoming a zombie not only involves the usual hand-waving related to becoming undead, but also lets you just start ignoring physics entirely to create zombie fountains.

I cannot wait until this comes out - I have read the book and it is awesome because it is actually 'realistic' and as believable as it can be. There was a character in the book that was a left wing coke addicted tv pundit - I am still trying to work out who they were making fun of.

It's going to be nothing like the book.

I've read the book many times and I don't remember a "left wing coke addicted tv pundit".

So, the thing about this movie is that it's broken. It has always been broken. It has broken people (Brad Pitt's company went out and got the director quite on purpose, and now the two hate each other so hard that there are rumors they won't even talk to one another on set without a third party intervening), a broken script (the script that was greenlit however many years ago that was got completely rewritten once and then Damon Lindelof was brought in to re-rewrite the ending), and the visual data that was recorded was broken (it has gone through significant reshooting). The release date has already been pushed at least twice, and at one point I believe it was slotted in the death months (January/February) before it got bumped to next summer.

What I'm saying here is that it's definitely going to be nothing like the book, and also it's probably going to be terrible, so for everybody's sanity and well-being, I would strongly recommend that you set your expectations as low as possible. It could be a surprise, but everything about its production history suggests that it is a snowman made entirely of the least savory human secretions.

Why do people keep seeking out Marc Forster for action films? Why? Why?

Son, I am dissapoint.
Just watched the trailer on another board, yikes, might be a good movie but not WWZ.

Funny, someone made a spoof trailer made up of other zombie movies and it looked way better.

Not a spoof trailer (if we're thinking about the same one), but a fan-made trailer, which by it's very definition is always full of wishful thinking (spoof would be taking the piss on, which it's not) - but I agree, it did look much better.

They were in that Caribbean luxury hideaway that was overrun by rampaging locals. I do believe he ended up rutting with the Ann Coulter character as the mob rushed the place.

I always imagined the guy to be Bill Maher.

Actually, that story took place in NYC and I think Max was just making in fun of everyone - I'm not so sure he had someone in mind (beyond the obvious one of Paris Hilton). Could have been Bill Maher.

The merc telling the story was in a Caribbean luxury resort.

I think a few characters from WWZ were pretty easy to figure out, Howard Dean as the "crazy" politician, Howard Stern as the "vulgar" morning radio personality, Paris Hilton, Bill Maher as I mentioned above.

Shame, I had high hopes about this project, and seeing the popularity of "Walking Dead" i would have liked it to be a series or at least a trilogy or more of movies, like the old tim-ey movie serials.
Instead we get CGI swarms.

They used 1st edition rules.

The blind monk was living off the land in an unpopulated winderness and encountering the odd wandering zombie. Not quite the same as trying to garrison a population center during an outbreak. I took that bit of the story as a demonstration that the real danger was The Great Panic, rather than the plague itself.

When I first heard about the movie I was excited but wondered how they would make such a book into a single movie. It's becoming clear that they couldn't figure that out either.

Yeah, that's what I thought as well.

That's a pity. While the structure of the book doesn't fit a movie, I had hoped they would take elements and make a "documentary". I think something in the style of District 9 could have been nice. This looks horrible, and not in a good way.

It's really sort of odd the fake-documentary framing hasn't been used much at all for zombie flicks. There was American Zombie, but that's the only one that comes to mind. (And it was forgettable enough I had to do a bit of google-rummaging before identifying it.) It certainly would have been a good fit for an adaptation of WWZ.

There was Romero's HORRIBLE Diary of the Dead, as well. That was kind of a found footage movie, but the people behind the camera were specifically making a documentary.

I'd love to see WWZ as a Troll Hunter style thing, but we'll have to wait for something like that. For now, we get zombies that behave like liquid.

Yeah, I'd filed Diary of the Dead into the "Found Footage, Crap" memory drawer, but there was the sort-of documentary angle if you squint at it right. They were desperately filming to get the truth out there, the truth that was being hidden from the world, the truth about the zombie apocalypse that...they learned about from network news. But they would uncover the hidden truth!

A non-crap found footage WWZ could also work. But it would have to make a leap past the all-too-common found footage conceit of a single group of characters with the one character. It could be instead stitched together from umpty different sources, an arc of vignettes. I'm thinking something like the big setpiece fight in "Chronicle" about the high school buddies stumbling into telekinetic powers, which was found footage but stitched together from all sorts of security camera footage, people shooting hasty WTF cellphone videos as telekinetic teens burst through their apartments like the Kool-Aid Man, etc.

But instead, zombie superfluid dynamics and I-swear-I-will-return-to-you! heartfelt grimaces.

On the upside, it'll probably still be better than Diary of the Dead.

Couldn't resist a quote from this article. Damon Lindelof thinks the ending of WWZ is abrupt and incoherent! And he's not saying it as a selling point!

Plan B was to do something that presumably didn't involve those things.

For now, I'll be optimistic and continue on with my current belief that Lindelof lives in some kind of fantasy opposite-world where his own work qualifies for those descriptors.

A couple co-workers mentioned this movie in a positive manner today and then seemed skeptical when I told them it looked like garbage. I just watched the trailer again and I feel confident in saying that it still looks like garbage and will probably end Brad Pitt's career.

I saw a commercial for the movie on regular TV last night. It looked like any other monster of the week movie, except with hyper active zombies. Any reader of the book who hadn't seen a trailer would be shocked by the commercial.

Short of somehow this becoming a speedy zombie cult movie I predict this sucker will bomb big time.

I caught the trailer for this before Star Trek: Into Darkness (in 3D), and if I hadn't known in advance that it was a zombie film, I wouldn't have been able to tell you from watching the trailer. Everything was so muddy and indistinguishable. All I could clearly determine was that there's a helicopter, stuff blows up good, and for some reason Brad Pitt's in it. I've seen more coherent SyFy Original Movies.

The book's been in my backlog for the better part of two or three years now, and I still intend to read it, but I don't think I'll be going to see this.

The trailer I saw before Star Trek was pretty straightforward. It's a summer blockbuster disaster movie with family man Brad Pitt on a quest to save the world from the zombie hoard.

Of course even if it's a huge success the Top Men of the internet can still console themselves with the knowledge that the dumb masses are just too dumb to realise how dumb this dumb movie is.

So why in the world would you pay for the rights to a massively popular book, and then absolutely change everything? Including everything that made the book popular in the first place. It makes no sense. Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just make a zombie movie rather than negotiating and paying for the rights to the book then inviting criticism and comparison when you change so much?

I'm going to pay millions of dollars to option the rights for "Borderlands" then making it a movie about a trucker and his monkey pal in a cross-Pandora race to save the teen center staring Judge Reinhold and Matt LeBlanc.

Still sounds better than World War Z or After Earth. I'd go see it!

Does the monkey talk and/or smoke a cigar?