World War Z: Book and movie review (warning, LONG!)

"Zombies don't represent anything in my mind except a global change of some kind. And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That's really all they've represented to me." — George Romero

This is the sentiment firmly embraced by Max Brooks when he wrote the fantastic novel, World War Z, and the one that flew right over the heads of the creators of Brad Pitt's newest cinematic abortion of the same name. Now, I've just finished reading the book, and only now do I feel the need to waste some virtual ink ranting about it. To make this review complete, I'm going to talk about both the book and the movie, and tell you exactly what I liked about both and what I didn't like about both.

Zombies

So, first of all, we need to talk about the zombie story, because really, there is only one zombie story. The dead rise en masse, society is overwhelmed and the film or book follows a small and shrinking cast of survivors as they're slowly repurposed into zombie chow. The zombie story is something that has become so ingrained in our culture that it can basically be classified as it's own genre. Night of the Living Dead may have been an excellent film in its own time, but by this point, it's been ripped off so often that almost the entirety of the zombie genre can basically be summed up as 'Like Night of the Living Dead.....except for...' Because of this, my favorite zombie movies are those that try to subvert the zombie genre, and most importantly, those works of fiction that focus on the reaction of the human survivors, because that's what's important here. The zombies, ironically, are almost superfluous to the zombie genre, and could be replaced by any unthinking, antagonistic force, like space aliens, or a natural disaster, or inexplicably carnivorous lawnmowers. They're just a generic bad guy, a whole race of plot devices, really, that serve to get the story moving. There's a reason nobody ever shot a movie that was nothing more than two hours of zombies tearing people apart, moaning, shuffling listlessly and getting shot. The reason for that (other than that it would never make it past the ratings) is that, except for the few wargame-addicted psychopaths in the back row, wanking, it would be BORING for most people.

Book

Right, now for my rant on why World War Z works as a book. Max very cleverly sets things in the post-war universe, and styles himself as a reporter, doing interviews of people who survived the zombie war. This works, because each story is a very personalized account of how normal people handled the stress of a zombie apocalypse. The real tension in the book isn't from the onrushing tide of the undead, which really, is nothing more than some vague, impending doom that hangs over people's heads, but the people's reactions to it. From armchair military types who mess up battle strategies in the stupidest ways possible, smug dickheads who try to profit from the catastrophe by selling placebos to a desperate populace, or just ordinary people fleeing the disasters, and end up as unwitting invitees to a donner-party re-enactment event, the real horror is the fact that this is all rather plausible. You could see people, in the fits of hysterics abandoning their houses to trek up the frozen mountains of Canada, insulated only by civilian clothing and laptops. You could absolutely see America launching a war of propaganda, and cocking it up. One of the things I lived about this book was that the entire world is kind of equally fucked during the war. Don't expect this book to come up with the stereotypical 'MURRICA SAVES THE DAY' plot, because the American military is just as totally incompetent as the military of every other country. World War Z takes place in much the same way as a real catastrophe would take place, over the course of several years, and instead of just handwaving the end of civilization like most zombie fiction does,  it shows exactly how the breakdown takes place. Genre savvy readers can point out all the mistakes pretty easily, but they aren't facing a life-or-death situation, like the characters are. People in the books make pretty stupid decisions, shockingly, just like REAL PEOPLE in panicky situations.

One thing I have to say is really cool, focusing on the zombies for a second, is the fact that Brooks actually managed to make slow-moving zombies scary. Now, I'm not one of those zombie purists, who think that 28 Days Later is an insult to the genre because their made up zombies can run when Romero's couldn't. You know what's a lot scarier than something that can kill you if it catches up to you? Something that kills you if it catches you and moves really, really fast. Brooks' zombies don't do that, and amazingly, still manage to maintain the tension. Sure you can outrun one of the WWZ undead by walking at a brisk pace, but one thing everyone seems to forget is that there are a LOT of them. The zombies in this book come in the thousands, forming a literal, living, hungry tidal wave, all of them crawling over each other in massive chain swarms. It's easy to think that you'll get away, but everyone else is trying to do the same thing. The zombies are relentless, and pretty hard to kill, and eventually, you're going to be that unlucky guy caught at the back of the traffic jam.

Overall, the book isn't perfect. There are some slight things that made me think 'hang on, that wouldn't work.' For example, the US military's Shock and Awe weapons used in the Battle of Yonkers not phasing the zombies at all. Now, whether or not the zombies are vulnerable to headshots, I'm pretty sure being vaporized by artillery and concentrated tank fire would reduce the undead to squishy Solanum shakes. There was also another part where the eeeeeeevil Ukranian military decides that the best way to separate the infected refugees crossing a bridge from non-infected is to give them a delicious mustard-gas bombing to the face, never mind that fire-bombing the bridge would have had the same effect, and wouldn't have left dozens of zombies to be fought. Still, none of these things really ruined my enjoyment of the book, and the few mistakes can be put down to unreliable narrators and simple human error in desperate situations. Brooks' zombies can be a little unrealistically resilient, and magically immune to deep sea pressure, but most of this can be put down to the particular flavor of bullshitium at work here (Solanum) which is at least consistent. I definitely recommend this book if you're a fan of the zombie apocalypse genre.

Film

Ok, now, take everything I just said about the book, and just chuck it out a window. This film was almost aggressively bad, somewhere between the cinematic equivalent of getting punched repeatedly in the face and trying to eat deep-fried condoms. I had to read the book to appreciate just how fucking terrible this movie was, because, when I first saw it, my brain was still off, and I thought it could have been an alright zombie movie with a really shitty ending (and I'll get to that later). In hindsight, however, after my brain has adjusted, and Brad Pitt's charismatic beard have worn off, this film becomes such a poorly managed excuse that it really made me wonder if it was developed in a government lab as some kind of memetic weapon against DVD piracy. There's so much wrong here that I barely know where to start.  I think I'll get the one bit of praise that I can give this movie out of the way so it won't interrupt the river of hate I'm about to gush. The zombies in the film were actually very well done, and were really frighteningly inhuman. When they moved and attacked, they really captured the image of the living tidal wave of bodies, so kudos to whoever did that effect. You were the only one involved in this production who had a brain. Right, now to move on to the hate.

The movie abandons all that contravertial sociopolitical commentary shit that the book was going for, and decides to go with another 'Like Night of the Living Dead....but....' plot, in this case, following that sentence with 'but with some globehopping'. The movie follows Brad Pitt (and I guess his family, but they become irrelevant pretty soon) as he tries to find the secret behind the zombie apocalypse and the cure for it and blah blah blah. The movie very quickly degenerates into that one zombie movie we've seen a billion times before, except that they travel to different countries. That's literally it. There are no words for how much wasted potential this is when compared to the book. Brooks got the idea that the zombies aren't really important, but the film cleverly decides to ignore that piece of wisdom in favor of  MOAR ZOMBIIIIIES! We barely get to know one bunch of boring, unlikeable characters before they're killed off and we get to the next set-piece that the zombies are going to destroy. The entire point of the book is how the world, and I mean the WHOLE WORLD reacts to the zombie apocalypse. Predictably, that stance proved far too controversial for the filmmakers, who decided that....SURPRISE! AMERICA IS HERE TO SAVE YOU ALL!!

Now, spoiler warning, I'm about to talk about the ending, because it is one of the cheapest, stupidest cop-outs I have ever seen in any medium. So, Brad Pitt gets to a medical lab, and because he read the script, realizes suddenly that the zombies only attack healthy people. The undead horde actually ignore some GI with a leg injury, an old man, and a kid with cancer. So, armed with this knowledge, Brad injects himself something from a biohazard cell in the lab, which could have been literally anything from Ebola to Anthrax (we don't see a label), and walks past the zombies who ignore him completely. He's safely inoculated when he reaches his scientist buddies. Now, a few problems. First of all, why would the zombies, who are specifically identified as being undead, as in walking corpses, give half a shit if the humans were 'healthy?' Does cancer or old age really slow an animated dead body down that much? What difference would it make anyway? If anything, it would make them easier to convert. It's explicitly mentioned that these zombies require brain-destruction to put down, so why on earth would they care about a little typhoid in their bloodstreams if it can't actually kill them? Secondly, I'm not a microbiologist, but I can't think of a disease with an incubation period of about one second, that can make you fatally ill, with no side effects, and can be easily cured with a simple vaccine. Naturally, nothing of the sort happens in the books, presumably because Max Brooks doesn't need help eating solid food.

The movie really just misses the point in so many ways, you'd think they'd need a committee to manage all the ways they could possibly insult the audience. I can see why Brad Pitt and the director got pissy with each other, as Pitt, being an intelligent individual apparently wanted to make a much truer adaptation. Unfortunately, despite this, WWZ actually managed to come out ahead in the box office, and has a sequel in the works. If that isn't a statement about the apocalyptic state of the world, I don't know what is.

/rant

- Kephn