The most zombies ever: World War Z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcwTxRuq-uk

Release date

June 21, 2013

aka ZOMBIES THEY FLY @ U FACE

death can build a bridge

Ugh. Book was good, this looks less so.

I never read (or have even heard of) the book, but apparently it's as loosely based as can possibly be.

You should try to track down the audiobook, as Max Brooks called in lots of family favors and got people like Alan Alda, Henry Rollins, Mark Hammill and Rob Reiner as different characters. Real solid.

The book is a snoozefest.

Liked the book, even the blind samurai zombie killer. This looks like fast digital zombies. Also, you already know there is no way they'll let Brad Pitt's family get eaten.

The zombie floods look like Transformers transforming, i.e. a visual effect so fluid, it's distracting instead of terrifying or awesome.

I love the book and I knew it wasn't gonna be the same but this looks more like, idk, Distric 9 or something?

i'm sure I'll see it but I'm not as excited now that I've seen the trailer

also moratorium on continual foghorn noise in trailers.

I want to see them use that in a trailer for a movie about tug boats.

brad pitt gets LESS interesting to watch as the years go by. and he's a terrible actor. interesting people usually become more fun to watch as they get older. boring people just get more boring.

The interesting bits of World War Z (the book) weren't tied to human family scale events. It was scenes like Nelson Mandela embracing the Redeker apartheid-era plan for urban security.

I have no doubt the adaptation will be hormonally entertaining. I don't think it will be provocative or convey anything like the globalist agenda of the Max Brooks book.

FWIW, the World War Z audiobook is superlative. Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, John Turturro and their less well known colleagues all played their bit parts with gusto.

sanpaku otm

@SS a lot of A-list actors have accepted a bifurcation of their careers into summer movie / teen demographic shite and more enduring work. Brad Pitt isn't one of the best of his generation, granted, but he does do decent craft in his fall/winter films.

can't watch this because glasgow

looks kind of run-of-the-mill

sanpaku otm about "not tied to human family scale events", most of the energy of the book comes from longer-term institutional response

. It was scenes like Nelson Mandela embracing the Redeker apartheid-era plan for urban security

And the guy whose absolutely convinced Michael Stipe is on his zombie killing patrol

why would pitt be asking "what is this," when in the book iirc the outbreak had happened from china and everyone kind of knew it was coming one way or another? agh this is already making me (minorly) mad. oh well.

The zombies rushing and overturning the bus makes this look so so bad.

ugh this looks awful

I would rather watch starship troopers again instead of this movie I think

World War Zzz

In June 2012, the film's release date was pushed back and the crew returned to Budapest for seven weeks of additional shooting. Damon Lindelof was hired to rewrite the third act, but did not have the time to finish the script and Drew Goddard was hired to rewrite it. The reshoots were due to take place between September and October 2012.

promising!

jesus, they initially got Lindelof of all people to rewrite the ending? desperate move

Looks like Cloverfield, as far as epic-scale monster movie from single POV.

Before rewrites, written by Scott Z. Burns (Informant, Contagion).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z_%28film%29

The screenplay was written by Babylon 5 and Rising Stars creator J. Michael Straczynski, who identified the challenge in adapting the work as "creating a main character out of a book that reads as a UN Report on the zombie wars"

...in 2008

4 years later and they're showing us cruddy CGI and.....WHAMMMMMMMMMP

I would rather watch starship troopers again instead of this movie I think

Why do I feel that this statement means different things to you than it does to me.

that whole wiki description is amazing. 2008: "could a zombie movie win best picture?" 2012: "alright everybody back to budapest!"

I mean "I would rather drink the finest 18 year old scotch while hanging out in a room full of happy puppies than watch this movie" gives me abt the same amount of information man c'mon.

The mass zombie attacks look dope imo but ugh @ the whole "In a world... of four billion zombies... can one good looking dude save his own family?"

I dunno, it worked pretty good for War of the Worlds, but this looks like Brad Pitt will be spending less time Running in Panic and more Being Heroic. WoTW was also pretty good at establishing a framework for eg episodes with Tim Robbins exhibiting some of the psychological effects of invasion that the WWZ book was good at - as I see someone's just said over on the Walking Dead thread :)

Here purely because Glasgow.

Yeah, it's weird to see Glasgow somehow looking both just like Glasgow and just like an American city at the same time. Quite impressed by the subtlety of the CG they've added to the streets and buildings, especially compared to how godawful some of the other CG is.

it's weird to see Glasgow somehow looking both just like Glasgow and just like an American city at the same time

Yeah, this.

The zombie floods look like Transformers transforming, i.e. a visual effect so fluid, it's distracting instead of terrifying or awesome.

― the body of a spider... (scampering alpaca), Friday, November 9, 2012 1:09 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, kinda like this guy too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOACsaFA_FY

the hordes of zombies cgi also reminded me of the hordes of agent smiths cgi from Matrix II

The mass zombie attacks look dope imo but ugh @ the whole "In a world... of four billion zombies... can one good looking dude save his own family?"

yeah this was pretty 2012

italics to mean the movie 2012 not "this was pretty so this year"

Before rewrites, written by Scott Z. Burns (Informant, Contagion).

Always felt like Contagion was WWZ without zombies. And incredibly dull.

Pretty sure World War Z is this instance has been reduced to World War NYC or whatever city that is.

World War Wherever Brad Pitt Is.

apparently it's part of a trilogy (or at least for now) ... so there's v faint hope that they might explore more of the story. Maybe. Assuming the other 2 movies get made.

so far, so meh

It's Glasgow Philadelphia.

xpost

I've only seen one of these movies all the way through but Marc Forster may have the most diverse record of underwhelming movies of late

2000 Everything Put Together
2001 Monster's Ball
2004 Finding Neverland
2005 Stay
2006 Stranger Than Fiction
2007 The Kite Runner
2008 Quantum of Solace
2011 Machine Gun Preacher
2013 World War Z

I've seen three of those, and of those three I only like one.

Whoops.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2013/04/brad-pitt-world-war-z-budget

In her revealing report, Holson also speaks to director Marc Forster and Paramount executives Marc Evans and Adam Goodman about the many problems that plagued the set—which included re-writing and reshooting 40 minutes of the film to find a coherent ending—and, most astonishingly, how the budget ballooned to around $200 million.

While closing down the production in Malta, for instance, the wrap-up crew found a stack of purchase orders related to the cast and extras that had been casually tossed into a desk drawer and forgotten; the amount totaled in the millions of dollars.

If this and Gatsby bomb...

lol it's waterworld

with a z

I so wanted to be in zombie-summer-event-movie's corner, but this is about 20 percent dece and 80 percent dull, ± roughly 20 percent. The "third act" is also the lamest part, so I shudder to think of how bad it was originally.

seeing it tomorrow night.

The more that is revealed in trailers the worse this looks

otm

Damon Lindelof was brought in to rewrite the ending, so what more do you need to know?

zombies on a plane has some scare potential but then they decided to resolve that, in the trailer, with rupturing the cockpit and having everybody fly out and oh wait iron man 3 already did that just earlier this year

Except I bet no one catches these people.

Though it would be awesomely shark-vs-zombie stupid if it featured a zombie in a parachute attacking Brad Pitt in a parachute as they plummet down to earth.

NYPost sowing controversy!

To the extent there is a story — detective work so easy it could have been done on the phone — it takes a pernicious turn when Israel, alone, is said to have known about the zombie apocalypse in advance. In a world where perhaps hundreds of millions believe Israel knew about 9/11 beforehand, this shows poor judgment, to put it mildly. The movie backtracks by saying Israel is quick with the panic button because of its history, but that only makes it worse: Sorry, but Hitler and Munich aren’t to be used as cover for propagating the rancid fiction that Israel is suspiciously adept at predicting disaster in advance.

"Z" is for "Zionists" DO U SEE?

goooooooooooood this thing was really not good

First third was ok, wheels pretty much fell of anything that was remotely good about it by the time they hit Jerusalem, and the whole lab everything was like whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat the fuck am I even watching now, when is this moving going to be OVER

whoever decided that the zombies should behave like pterodactyls needs a dickpunch. and I felt very shortchanged, goddamn hippies making me sit through a boringass UN zombie movie and of course there's barely any gore, I don't even get to laugh in gleeful delight at a headshot or anything. HIPPIES.

Brad Pitt is handsome. Is about my only take away.

*moving = movie

oh and you know that a movie is really not doing a very good job when husband and family are separated and you could care less if he ever sees them again

If this is a big enough bomb, it could finally kill the sad careers of Marc Forster and Damon Lindelof. Here's hoping.

The twist is that Lindelof's career been dead the whole time.

I'm getting really tired of his handwavey bullshit writing

the whole 'resolution' to that story was such a bunch of baloney

on way home tonight, radio one film reviewer (i was in car and could not be arsed to change channels, as five live was dreary as f*ck), gave this a massively positive review.

so i was all 'who do i trust more, VG, or this girl who gushes over brad ?'

no choice in my world.

i am avoiding this until on tv for free. cheers for the real groove VG ..

(truthbomb : i saw the trailer pre iron man 3 screening, and thought the excess zombies scenes just looked ott cgi'd crap .. so i was halfway there already but you've confirmed my reservations .. )

Wait a minute this movie is rated PG-13? Fuck that.

exactly.
a zombie movie for teletubbie viewers ..

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-43Li92VvYpQ/UZ5qMPDruoI/AAAAAAAAA_o/-DTqPey9k-E/s320/my+boyfriend%2527s+back.jpg

yeah for some reason I didn't notice the pg13, but cmon seriously what is even the point of that

Mr Veg and I were talking about the movie last night, and we both agreed it's not that is SO horrible that you would walk out, or come out feeling annoyed that you'd wasted 2 hours on it. It's just more of a, "well that was a thing that happened that was dumb."

I want to hear more about pterodactyl zombies

they clack their teeth!

actually I just realized what they remind me of: Skeksis, in the Dark Crystal.

you don't really get a sense of the pterodactyl-ness early on, it's not til later when they feature a few isolated zombies that it becomes noticeable

it's really stupid

Skeksis? Now I'm suddenly MORE interested.

Do the zombies merger with the Ur-Ru at the end to become Ur-Zoms y/n?

crossed this off my list of things to do this weekend thanks to you, vg

lol look if you're going to pay attention to anything I say, more fool you :)

in other news Mr Veg got the unabridged audiobook of World War Z, which in Max Brooks' own words IS the movie version of the book. so I'm looking forward to enjoying that on our next car trip.

It's a great audiobook.

I listened to it ages ago and loved it. I didn't know there was an unabridged version. 15 hours! wee :D

Unabridged version just came out.

After I saw Warm Bodies and thought it was a dece-enough film until it went off the rails at the midway point, ain't no way in hell I'm seeing this. It looks like Day After Tomorrow but replace floods with mountains of smelly mobile dead people

Yeah, Max Brooks has said that the audiobook is his version of making the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8aDakPtUco

anyone see the ad for this on the new york times homepage? i drops down and covers the screen when you first get there, and is made to look like news headlines that say "Population Loss to Exceed 4.7 billion" and "Martial Law Declared Across Eastern Seaboard." on first glance, for a microsecond, it's not unconvincing.

do we feel this is responsible advertising?

fyi this is not the responsible advertising thread, this is the pterodactyl zombies thread

I feel like all of the zombie movies coming out now are being geared to people who like making stupid jokes like "Easter = Zombie Jesus Day" and who frequently work the phrase "zombie apocalypse" into every day conversation.

Someone needs to breathe new life into the genre (SEE WHAT I DID THERE...god I suck)

Oh, a vampire. Wrong thread.

once i didn't get hired for a job at a publishing house because i mentioned something about zombies and the editor mostly worked on vampire fiction and actively disliked zombie fiction. or at least, that's when the interview took a turn for the worse...

lol

wow, this was ... not good at all

is the conclusion that Brad Pitt reasons with the zombies and they are given the state of North Dakota to settle in?

the zombies get so bored with Brad Pitt they collectively throw themselves off a cliff into the ocean to make the movie stop

nice to see Congo rightfully influencing 21st century cinema

Wasn't looking forward to this but ended up not minding it all that much. Kind of a reverse of most high concept blockbusters in that rather than opening with an idea and then quickly descending into non-stop action, this one begins with a lot of violence and chaos before developing some ideas in the latter half. Best I can say for it really is that, especially after Man of Steel, I was neither bored nor irritated, and that at least when this movie is stupid (as with the whole sequence involving a commercial airliner and its immediate aftermath), it is audaciously stupid (I half expected the movie to end with Pitt, now just a head, fighting off zombies with a knife between his teeth). Also, was relieved when the movie found something to do with Pitt's wife and children fairly early on and thus didn't consist of him constantly looking for them or rescuing them from harm.

Still have to wonder (potential spoliers ahead why anyone would bother going to the trouble of constructing a supposedly impenetrable wall around a city only to leave it unguarded and rather easily vulnerable to attack. Or how exactly Brad Pitt gets from his final Point A to Point B. Or how zombies, though undead, are invulnerable to broken bones. Also, Marc Forster (director of everyone's least favourite Bond since at least A View to a Kill) is still a crap action director who can't even pull off one of the film's numerous attempts at jump scares. I'm also tired of all movie scientists since Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park speaking in these kind of would-be profound catch phrases ("sometimes the greatest strength is the greatest weakness" or whatever the fuck).

I thought this was kinda fun, but not enough to fight about it.

Weirdest thing was seeing Matthew Fox in what was basically a featured extra role - he never gets a close-up, or even a straight-ahead shot of his face. You only catch it if you recognize his voice or body language in a couple wider shots. He doesn't even have a character name - he's "Parajumper" in the credits!

(I mean, presumably he had a big part that ended up chopped after the re-shoots and edits, but it's just weird how you see & hear JUST enough of him to go "whoa, Jack Shephard?"

Mr Veg was telling me that apparently they are, or were, planning on a trilogy

u_u

i liked man of steel a lot better than this

When I was reading the book I remember being very conscious that "this would make a great movie" :(

if I don't give a fuck by the end of that movie then it's a stretch to think that I would have TWO MORE fucks to give

when I read the book I was thinking this would make the greatest and most expensive hbo series of all time

we're listening to the new extended audiobook of WWZ on car trips now --- fking great imo

forget that stupid boring movie

When I was reading the book I remember being very conscious that "this would make a great movie" :(

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, June 26, 2013 11:09 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really? seemed like it could be a good theoretical tv series but infilmable as is, to me

the most interesting parts of it are about, like, bureaucratic reorganization

I don't know why I thought that. Basically because it's pure action, I guess. It's very practical and very visual. I don't remember the bureaucracy parts at all :/

well it's probably my taste! long passages of a dude explaining how the reconstituted US army learned to supply and fight more like a civil war conscript rifle force was way more interesting than, idk, the japanese guy who turned himself into a ninja in the woods

As we were leaving the theater, my one friend lamented the lack of "character development," which I thought was a strange criticism to make about an action movie about zombies. Thinking back on it, though, I kinda get what he means: no one here does anything especially noble or especially awful and there is no reason to feel anything one way or another for any of the characters involved. They could be anyone, which I suppose makes a point of its own, but that's not a point that I think the film was ever trying to make, and it certainly doesn't make for very compelling drama either.

your friend otm

yeah that's a good take.

it's a shame this is so inert because I think you could really argue that it does something interesting with the genre. if zombie narratives are often on some level about immunity--about securing safe places against contamination by "others", building walls, boarding up doors, etc--then this movie seems to suggest that approach is flawed and that "weakness" is what really defeats the zombie. which is to say turning away from a destructive search for greater purity or homogeneity. not sure the movie can really support that these but it's a thought it raises.

I'm trying to read the book now for a book club. 100 pages or so in, I can't get into it at all. (Haven't seen the movie.) Telling a story as an oral history from multiple eyewitnesses' perspectives is an interesting idea but I just don't see much reason to care about anyone or anything in this story when everyone's there so briefly. The political stuff is most interesting to me but not enough time has been spent on it imo. The popularity of this book honestly surprises me because it doesn't seem very immediate or gripping (and it would have never occurred to me to make a movie of this!).

oh dude. dude.

just...look, just keep reading. if you still don't like it by the end fine, but don't quit 100 pages in.

I thought the book was pretty good, save a blind samurai zombie killer or two.

You might be asking: was that a spoiler? Could that really have been a spoiler? Well, I'm not telling.

like the individual stories are good as nutshells in and of themselves - snapshots, I guess -- and then as you get more and more stories you get a much bigger picture of the global impact, political ramifications, military ramifications, as well as how it affects individuals on a personal level.

i love the hell out of it imo

Loved this book so much, and also love the super-nerdy books it owes a heavy debt to: 'The Third World War: August 1985' and 'Red Storm Rising'.

The audiobook was a lot more engaging than the print. Perhaps the best cast ever assembled for an audiobook.

spencer don't forget "warday"

Huh, did you see this?

On May 14, 2013, the unabridged audiobook was released by Random House Audio as World War Z: The Complete Edition (Movie Tie-in Edition): An Oral History of the Zombie War. It contains the entirety of the original, abridged audiobook, as well as new recordings of each missing segment. A separate, additional audiobook containing only the new recordings not found in the original audiobook was released simultaneously as World War Z: The Lost Files: A Companion to the Abridged Edition.

That means they reissued the audio book with even more speaking parts.

Yeah audiobook is 10x more enjoyable than the book.

the movie was p good

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0a3fg-fUWdw/T3On8vGgmVI/AAAAAAAAA4A/PJg-1gRMH5Y/s200/bunk-the-wire.gif

Did the first seven(!) hours of the unabridged audiobook a couple weeks ago en route to summer vacation, looking forward to the remaining five on the way back next week. Pretty well done, forgot how much I like the scope and mundane/"well of course that would happen" things I never pondered about global cataclysm.

Far be it from me to smh at anyone this summer. I loved White House Down.

i agree w/s1ocki. nothing special but it was a competently executed "breezy romp" (which i guess you shouldn't say about an apocalyptic zombie movie but still...)

it was a pretty swift movie, almost too swift. brad pitt seemed to show up in israel so he could get a quick tour, point out that the wall was breached, and then escape. best part was the philly/newark shit.

my friend's from newark and he said the theater was goin nuts at that stuff

part of the original score sounds a lot like this fwiw, cfcf shd sue and get that zombie money

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-eA1yILxYM&list=PL33CAB39CCC8FB7BE&index=2

this was on tv at the gym the other day and i can't remember this actor's name (in the middle) or what i associate him with, and it's killing me inside. please help.

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/274/full/1379394091_1.jpg

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0401264/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t25

i guess he looked familiar to me too

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0401264/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t25

this film was a pos but notable - to me - because the opening scene, set in Philadelphia, was filmed in George Square, Glasgow

that was literally the only thing i enjoyed in this movie

apparently i posted itt about glasgow already but i have no recollection of it ;_;

spencer don't forget "warday"

― the late great, Thursday, August 1, 2013 6:13 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

YES!

I watched this the other week in a slump of exhaustion & boredom that left me unable to find anything more worthwhile and it was wholly unremarkable except for the aforementioned Glasgow connection.

ohhhh of course, he's the annoying guy in Treme who is now in Orphan Black etc, THANK YOU.

the only thing i liked about this movie was setting up the young scientist who is going to solve everything, then having him slip and accidentally shoot himself to death within 30 seconds of getting on the ground.

"ohhhh of course, he's the annoying guy in Treme"

for a second there I thought you were talking about Steve Zahn

i was going to write 'most annoying guy in Treme' until i remembered Zahn (but his character got less annoying as it went on, and at any rate is far less annoying than the real-life inspiration).

I didn't mind him in Treme after the first season.

so uh i guess david fincher is directing the sequel to this hunk of shit

wtf

guy makes some weird choices

a sequel to a largely-unloved zombie movie seems particularly weird even by his standards tho

1st book was awesome?

almost none of it showed up on screen!

kinda unfilmable. unless it was a talking head documentary about a zombie apocalypse

Voiceover: Peter Fincher never made the sequel, allegedly because of the Chinese government's ban on film with zombies, which uh seems like it would have come up at some point with the first film.

Also from the wikipedia page, along with the normal troubles of a film which involves Damon Lindelhof:

Filming in Budapest commenced on the evening of October 10, 2011. That morning, the Hungarian Counter Terrorism Centre raided the warehouse where guns had been delivered for use as filming props.

The 85 assault rifles, sniper rifles, and handguns had been flown into Budapest overnight on a private aircraft, but the film's producers had failed to clear the delivery with Hungarian authorities, and while the import documentation indicated that the weapons had been disabled, all were found to be fully functional.

On February 10, 2012, the charges were dropped after investigators were unable to identify exactly which "organization or person" had "ownership rights"; therefore they could not "establish which party was criminally liable".

Watched this again bc my kid wanted to see it. I still think it's alright but the story is just an excuse for brad pitt to visit somewhere immediately before shit goes haywire. He's less a character and more a witness to catastrophe. And how the Israel aspect is introduced is amazingly bad, I mean talk about dropping in a loaded implication into the middle of a movie that doesn't even have the ability to smartly handle a zombie apocalypse plot, let alone pivot away from that bit of nonsense.

iirc one of the few apocalypse movies where people ride bikes?