Our friends over at Into the Dark have alerted the ZRC to the first trailer for the upcoming (and highly troubled) major Living Supremacist film ‘World War Z’, based somewhat loosely on the book of the same name by Max Brooks.

Having seen it, I have to say my earlier suspicions that the novel had been almost completely abandoned in favor of a new flavor of Zombie hating seem to have been correct.

This doesn’t look anything like ‘World War Z’. Dave Pruett of Into the Dark suggests a gnawing suspicion of another ‘I Am Legend’, where clumsy CG monsters run amok. For me it feels a lot like the later ‘Resident Evil’ movies, but in either case, CGI and action set-pieces have clearly been substituted for plot, pacing or story.

It’s not that having your ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ take place over a period of time is less offensive to the Zombie Rights movement. It’s more that any pretense of literary merit or social critique, which ‘World War Z’ definitely aims for, has been abandoned in favor of big explosions and lots of gunplay.

World War Z looks like it could have been made by Michael Bay.

Let’s face it: at least ‘World War Z’ is an interesting read, and when Max Brooks isn’t frothing at the mouth about the alleged menace of the Undead, he has interesting things to say about social planning, resource conflicts, technology, the organ transplant trade, etc. The Living Supremacism is leavened a bit.

The strangest thing is, if an adaptation of a very fast, superpowered ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ written by a mega-popular Zombie hater was the goal, why adapt ‘World War Z’? Why not ‘Marvel Zombies’, much of which was penned by Robert Kirkman? Seeing all those super-fast, rubbery CG Zombies flying across the landscape and clambering up vertical surfaces while NYC burns in the background I couldn’t help but think of Marvel Zombies. I imagine I’m not alone in that regard.

But no. This is ‘World War Z’, albeit the Lite, lo-cal, low thought version. In all its Zombie-hating infamy.

Coming in June 2013.

Tags: Books, Comics, Movies

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, November 9th, 2012 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.