![]() ![]() Interviews with government officials haunted by the clarity of hindsight, teenagers recounting years spent feral and the long road back to a semblance of normality. People would be talking about the lengths they went to in order to survive, the people the lost, the guilt of being alive. But picture it: Instead of wide-angle shots of CGI zombies swarming over the landscape at a breakneck pace, you get interviews with hollow-eyed survivors recounting their stories intercut with footage from the decade-long war. Now don't get me wrong, a documentary-style World War Z reboot would not be cheap, though networks like HBO and Netflix have shown there is a market for high-quality, big-budget genre television. In an era of Peak TV™ where mockumentaries like Houston, We Have a Problem and American Vandal are stretching the genre, while actual documentaries like those about the Fyre Festival are pop culture phenomenons, the iron is hot to strike with World War Z as it was meant to be adapted: accurately. World War Z did what the best of the genre has always done: used zombies as a metaphor to how humans react in a crisis. Chapters about battles gone wrong and the terrible choice that ultimately saved the species by sacrificing most of it. Chapters about how the rich were wrong about their money protecting them from hordes of zombies or angry citizens. Chapters about the folly of living on an island or a cruise ship. Chapters about those trapped on the International Space Station, children who became feral in the wilds of apocalyptic suburbia, armies carpet-bombing refugees only to have them rise up, now more dangerous than ever. There are chapters about Big Pharma creating false vaccines to line their pockets and keep the populace from panicking. ![]() There are chapters about years of chatter coming out of rural China about an outbreak that reanimated the dead and how hubris kept most governments from taking the threat seriously. I don't want to get too into the weeds here, but will note some highlights just to help set the stage for what Max Brooks was trying to do with World War Z. It's a documentary, told by those who lived it, with all the haunting hindsight audiences are used to when watching horrors unfold from the safety of the future. So, the narrator wrote this book to get the human element into the annals of history. Those stories were not data, so they were excised. The only problem was the narrator also collected the stories of the survivors. This report would hopefully help future generations, should the zombie menace rise again. Hired by the United Nations Postwar Commission, the narrator was tasked to travel the world in the decade following the end of "The Crisis" to collect data that would go into a after-action report. The book is a collection of stories set down in the aftermath of the plague that nearly wiped humanity out. It begins with an unknown narrator setting the tone. Instead, World War Z harkens back to one of the most ancient science-fiction tropes: the story within the story. There is certainly no vaguely anti-Semitic undertones as Jerusalem falls (within the books, Jerusalem is one of the few harbors of humanity that never collapses). There are no insect-like hordes sprinting through the streets. There is no race against time to find a cure (there isn't one). Max Brooks' novel is not a rollicking action-adventure. The shape is the same, but that's about it. Instead, it was the cinematic equivalent of ordering lobster-and-crab ravioli and getting microwave pizza rolls instead. It was a big budget spectacle that accurately showcased the panic such an outbreak would cause. The World War Z adaptation was a great, mindless (zing!) film about the new du jour in zombie cinema: the fast zombie. To which I say: Good, and I spit on its grave. ![]()
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