At the risk of having all the book snobs reading this look down on me I will confess the following: World War Z is one of my favorite books. I'm aware of its problems- why do people from different walks of life all talk the same in an oral history?- but I like the world it builds so much that I look past that.
You would think that having admitted that I would follow up by talking about how excited I am about the upcoming film version, but that's just not the case. The more I see, including the new trailer released today, the more disappointed I become.
Oh, they may call it World War Z, but World War Z it ain't.
I think we've all come to accept the fact that, except for the rarest of cases, adapting a property for a new medium means certain things have to be changed. What is frustrating is when a studio buys a property knowing they're only going to slap the title on a story that is tangentially, at best, related to the original work.
I'm looking at you, I, Robot.
That's not to say I think World War Z will be a bad movie. Humanity fighting zombies around the world is a story idea that has a lot of cinematic potential given the fact that most zombie flicks are small, localized affairs.
I just wish that if they were going to make a movie called World War Z it would actually feature stuff from the book with the same name. There wasn't even a main character in the book, let alone one that traveled around the world as he tried to figure out how to stop the zombies.
Oh well. At least the special effects look better in this trailer.
