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[PA Comic] Friday, October 4, 2013 - World War Why
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
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Well okay it isn't fucking Hemingway but goddammit it's better than 99% of anything else ever written or made about zombies stop ruining my fandom maaang.
I lost it right there.
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Nope. Not even close. The book takes place well after the Zombie War. The writer of the book is never in any peril. There is no search for a cure in the book. And the set pieces that fans of the book wanted to see are conspicuously absent from the movie.
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Also I got my Tithe print in! Wewt! They must've really had those things ready to go. The colors aren't as vibrant as on my monitor, but I am very happy with it. (That may also be a result of the crappy lighting down here.)
See this is my problem when an adaptation is made, and it gets bad reviews. Is it a bad film, or is it just that the fans are speaking up because it's not a) close enough to the sacred work, or b) not the film they wanted or expected. I'll still watch a good film, even if its only connection to the source is the title.
Well, I've never read the book but I did see the movie and it was pretty mediocre. Not that any recent zombie movies I have seen have been terribly inspiring.
Well, let me specify. The first 2/3 of the movie was pretty lame. But the final 1/3 was good. Of course, the ending was the part written by Damon Lindelof. Their original ending sucked so bad they hired him to come in and write them a new ending. Apparently they scrapped almost 45 minutes of really bad ending.
Consensus: We both kinda hated it. I wouldn't even say it was a bad movie, it was just really, really boring.
And the ending was terrible.
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I was excited to finally watch WWZ a few nights ago. Terribly disappointed in how stupid it was =\
The movie has a lot of problems: that they didn't put in the best parts of the book is just one of them.
I read the Harry Potter books before I saw the movies. And I completely understand the need to cut things for time, budget or to avoid loose ends because of the cuts made for the preceding reasons.
But there is a difference between editing the plot, and changing the plot. The first three of my four reasons are about that. The fourth reason is just the salt in the wound. If they had included The Battle of Yonkers, Sharon The Feral Girl (which could have been a prime contender for a Best Actress nomination) and The Battle of Hope they would have had all the tension, drama and spectacle they were trying to create.
WWZ fails to be anything but a paint-by-numbers zombie movie. It fails to make the zombies seem like a credible threat (everyone who dies does so because they are stupid. Show me someone who makes all the right moves and still dies, that is scary) and it fails to make you care about the main characters. It is formulaic and rather than stick to the source material even a little (slow zombies and slow incubation time actually heighten tension, fast zombies and short incubation time are just shock value) they instead jump on the 28 Days Later bandwagon.
The movie doesn't do anything that zombie movies are traditionally good at. It doesn't even entertain very well. The best thing you can say is that you spend the time saying "well that was a stupid thing to do" and you learn not to do really obviously dumb stuff.
If the movie had been good, I could have welcomed the changes they made. But they butchered the book with malice, and then draped the corpse over a festering turd of cinematography.
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When compared to the source material, it was terrible.
But switching from slow zombies to fast ones changed the whole feel. The book was about a long slog with constrained resources against a tireless enemy, and adapting to that. There was a "resource-to-kill ratio" (RKR), for crying out loud. The movie was about running around screaming, followed by playing hide-and-seek.
I think I was just disappointed that I didn't get to see any K9 dachshund units.
not sure what that says about me.
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Actually, I thought Warm Bodies was pretty good.
My biggest gripe about the movie is that I went into it expecting it to BE a "World War Z" movie. I went a couple months between reading the book and seeing the movie (though I have read the book a few times) and as far as I can tell, the only things the two had in common were a brief mention of the Warmbrunn-Knight report and the title.
The book was an in-depth documentary, done after the Zombie war, consisting of interviews with dozens of people across the world who recounted the different stages of the war. It painted a very realistic picture of the scenarios of initial outbreak, the mass panics, the destruction of much of humanity, the turning point of the conflict, and the long struggle to take back the planet, exterminate the threat, and rebuild society. It touched on all these topics while simultaneously flitting through different countries and cultures, examining the different ways that everything could play out and the economic and societal impacts and repercussions long after the most serious threats would have ended.
The movie was "Brad Pitt must find the zombie cure before everybody dies and his family gets evicted from their safe haven and thrown to the wolves, oh noes!"
Like I said, it was passable for a zombie movie and it had its high points, but at the end of the day, the book expands the genre and the movie gave me an excuse to eat popcorn for two hours.
Oh, I remember wanting to go see that movie and then somehow forgot about it. I am going to check it out now. Thanks for the reminder.
That is the opposite of what happened and part of the reason the movie is bad.
Anyway, I haven't seen the movie or read the book, but everyone I know who watched the movie without reading the book said it was "Meh" or at best, good for passing time. People who read the book absolutely hated it. I think that if a movie adaptation of a book is good on its own merits, even if it strays from a good book, is a success. It would still anger the diehard book-readers, of course. But if a movie is bad for newcomers AND the book-reading audience, then it is a failure. This strikes me as the latter.
Now, if only Ender's Game does not fall into this same bucket...
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The amount of displeasure in that expression is staggering.
The joke was that I found the book to be "really stupid" too. To the point that I put it down and stopped reading it because I found it to be too stupid. I haven't watched the movie, because it looked pretty meh and is based on a book I find to be really stupid.
Didn't check the book out, since when someone tells me it's "Studs Terkel with zombies," it just serves to remind me that there are Studs Terkel books I haven't read, and I need to remedy that situation.
But I did pick up the Zombie Survival Guide which was an underwhelming collection of zom-fic tropes. I'd rather go back and read early Walking Dead than load up the Guide on my Kindle again.
Thank you. I'll check it out, then.
Edit: Reading it now. What impresses me most is how well-researched it is with some of the place & culture details, which go a long way to ground the story in the real world.
Hollywood royally screwed the pooch on this one, but the medium wasn't quite right for it either, judging from what I've read so far. Done right, it'd be a mini-series similar in subject matter to The Walking Dead but structurally closer to the monster-of-the-week X-Files episodes. Maybe even cast Duchovny as the journalist who collects stories from the survivors like a kind of Dead Shoe Diaries.