All I really knew about the Max Brooks novel “World War Z” was that it was about a world war against zombies and that it was always out on the front table at Barnes and Noble. I had always been interested in checking it out, and this past summer I finally did, and boy was I bored.
The book is made up of a group of stories told in a non-fiction manner as a researcher for the U.N. Postwar Commission supposedly tours the world ten years after the zombie apocalypse, collecting stories from the survivors. It actually starts off with a wicked introductory story involving a child, but from that point on every single story begins to seem like the same thing, “Then the zombies came. Some of us died. Some got away. Yay!” I started to feel like a zombie while reading it.
Now, news breaks that Marc Forster is moving from Quantum of Solace into the director’s chair on the long gestating adaptation penned by J. Michael Straczynski. I have no idea how they are going to piece together the story, because watching a guy go around doing interviews while we sit back and watch flashbacks each time is going to get boring, because guess what, the person telling the story will live every time.
Forster tells Variety, “The genre always fascinated me, and when they pitched it to me, it reminded me of the paranoid conspiracy films of the ’70s like All the President’s Men.” It’s nice the genre interested him, but hasn’t the zombie craze prettty much come and gone? Hasn’t it been done every way imagineable and had at least one successful turn with each different iteration? What’s so different about this one?
Sorry, this idea doesn’t interest me. I would much rather see Forster work on something more unique.
