Zombie Movies

[Mithrandir]

I stop by the LL for, I think, the second time in 3+ years and one of my posts from 2008 is on the front page. This is a weird feeling.

Well, I guess I might as well contribute to the discussion...

I am kind of put off from seeing World War Z since is has absolutely nothing to do with the book, except for the name, but I keep hearing positive things about it so I think I have talked myself into going and seeing it.

S1 of Walking Dead was my favorite. The first episode of S1 of WD is one of my favorite single episodes of television ever. S2 was a step backwards in my opinion, just because it really felt like the series stagnated for quite a while. S3 had its ups and downs by I am really excited for S4, especially since Scott Gimple (the guy who wrote "Clear" and "Pretty Much Dead Already") is taking over.

[Alram]

I just finished watching all 3 episodes of the miniseries "In The Flesh". It really is a unique take on the zombie genre. Zombies who rose from the dead and ate the flesh of the living have now been cured and reunited with their families. The family dynamics and relationships with the community have real depth to them. The reactions of family and neighbors are colored not only by the fact that these now cured partially deceased syndrome sufferers (zombies or rotters as the local folk call them) once ate the flesh of the living, but also by their premorbid relationships with one another.
If you have cable, it is available on the "on demand" channel from BBC America. There are 3 one hour episodes, and next year there will be another season. The first episode moves a bit slowly, but the series gains steam, and episode 3 is very powerful with some emotional wallops.

[Lissa]

Eck! That is completely the opposite of the Book and Audiobook by Max Brooks (yes, Mel's son) then. The zombies there are slow and plodding. The push in Brook's story is to show the human condition, both the best and the worst when faced with potential extinction.

I saw the movie and can report that it does indeed have absolutely nothing to do with the book. If you go into it with the expectation that you won't be seeing the book, you won't be annoyed. I think someone in Hollywood just thought "gee, this book is popular, let's buy the rights to it so we have some guaranteed income via the name" and then proceeded to make whatever zombie movie they felt like making.

There were rumors abounding that the original version of the movie was so bad that they had to re-do the entire third act. I don't doubt this. The book, taken verbatim, would have made a horrible movie; if they had originally tried to stay true to it, that may have been why they refilmed the last section.

I most enjoyed the first act, because I enjoy seeing how society breaks down in the face of something world-ending (and what the book focuses more on). The rest of it was the fairly standard zombie fare (omg zombies, run! BRAINS!).

Well, the book taken verbatim would have had to been a mini-series, it covers too much ground for a movie, even at 3 1/2 to 4 hours.

What I wish Hollywood would stop doing is taking a book and turning it into a movie and having the movie only have the basic premise of the book. Some directors do a good job in following the book as much as possible with some changes that don't really detract from the overall story (like Jackson with the ghost army saving Minas Tirith in the movie whereas Tolkien wrote it that the ghost army opened up the ability of the Gondorian reinforcements to get back to Minas Tirith to aid in saving the city), and others do a horrible job (take Patriot Games or even Clear and Present Danger, both horrible movies that deviated quite a bit from the excellent books).

From what I had seen, I had pretty much resigned myself to not going to see World War Z because of the massive deviation from the book.