Forums Horror Movie Talk
"WORLD WAR Z" to be a HUGE SCALE Zombie flick?

From Slashfilm

MTV had the opportunity to talk with J. Michael Straczynski about his upcoming adaptation of Max Brooks’ World War Z. Straczynski says that it will be the first large scale zombie film.“Most zombie movies to this point have been small, focung on a few people in a house. And this has got real scare. You’re in India with hundreds of boats trying to get out of there with a tidal wave of zombies. The scale of what we’re doing here is phenomenal.”

Marc Forster recently gned on to direct, and Straczynski will be doing one more draft based on the filmmaker’s new notes. Straczynski calls the film “a thriller”, comparing it to the Bourne films. As cool as Straczynski makes the film sound, I’m a little nervous about the comparison to the Bourne movies, especially condering that Forster’s latest movie, Quantum of Solace, was heavily criticized for it’s disjointed action sequences.

AICN called Straczynski’s previous draft of the screenplay “a horror epic, a serious, sober-minded adult picture”, potentially “a genre-defining piece of work” with Best Picture potential (really?!). The bac premise of the book is that it is an oral history of the zombie war, compiled by an unnamed government employee. The movie follows this researcher, named Gerry Lane (posbly to be played by Brad Pitt, who is producing the project), as he travels the world conducting interviews with survivors, 10-years later. Forster told Variety that the story reminded him of “the paranoid conspiracy films of the ’70s like ‘All the Predent’s Men.”

The book was released in 2006, and is available on Amazon for $16.47. I’ve included the official plot description from the book below:

“The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of restance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimenon of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

I actually just found out about this book not too long ago but haven't had the chance to pick it up yet...I'm really looking forward to reading it and I love zombies so a movie for it would be great :)

I've been wanting to pick up this book for a while now... Glad it is being made into a film.

Really hope they can capture it.

Wow, i cant believe i have never herd of this.

The movie sounds wicked cool and i am actually interested in the book now.

If I can find it at the right price then I might just pick it up.

I'd hate to say it but you can find it on feebay pretty cheap... :)

Right now you can score the book on Amazon for $10.

And if you buy both this book and the Zombie Survival Guide (by the same author).. it's only $20.

Cool deal I'll have to check it out...I wanted to buy both anyway

the zombie survival guide is a must have for any zombie/survivalist fan. Brooks quite literally makes a survivalist handbook, but against zombies. Absolutely amazing to say the least. I have a copy of World War Z, but have not had the time to read it. If you get a chance, check out Max Brooks on youtube and you can see some of his college campus seminars where he talks at length about how to survive a zombie holocaust.....

take care, Tommy