World War Z - The Movie - The Thread (Don't judge a book by its cover)

[alexdz]

Well, it was as bad as I expected. PG-13 movie, nothing I haven't seen already, boring characters, incredibly predictable. What a waste for an adaptation, I hope that HBO picks it up in the future for a series close to the book.

[DarkSpyda04]

I could tell from the very fricken TV commercial that this movie would suck eggs because all I saw was Michael Bay explosions, camera switching every half a second, bodies falling, guns firing, Brad Pitt, more bodies falling, more explosions, bodies flying out of a plane, Brad Pitt, and a bus being toppled over followed by bodies flying everywhere. And you tell me not to judge a book by its cover. You are far too lenient for your own good. Now, I wanted to avoid the movie so badly but I ended up being dragged along to see it at the drive-in. I could not bare to watch it; so bloody boring. The only entertainment I could find was pointing out flaws and taking extended bathroom breaks. It's more fun to excrete the contents of my bowels than to watch this movie. Let's start cracking down on some of the things that went wrong.

Spoiler:

show spoiler

Now, I'm sure we know from basic science that women and children are completely and utterly helpless. I mean, seriously, whose ever heard of a women that does anything but scream and panic? It's crazy thoughts. Crazy thoughts I tell you! I guess we're lucky to have some random guy that we barely get to know as a character that meets disaster everywhere he goes to save the world. It's even better because he somehow miraculously crawls away from every incident without a scratch. You know what we call this? A plot shield. Why it must be a wonderful thing to have. I don't even know why he runs away from zombies when they come his way because with his luck they'd freeze solid in an attempt to scratch his beautiful face. I know, let's throw Brad Pitt in a horde of zombies. Maybe he'll act like a grenade and blow them up. Then we can pick him up and throw him at the next wave. Rinse and repeat until all the zombies are gone. Nobody will even have to lift a finger.

Oh, and did I mention that there is no character development? Well... yeah, well there is kind of no character development. Because people don't ever learn things and grow. People don't ever make mistakes but survive to learn how to correct those mistakes on the next attempt. No, people are quite static and never change.

Sure, Brad Pitt's life is "perfect", plane crash and getting pierced by the wreckage aside, but he's still the super jackass that only agrees to help humanity in exchange for his family's safety, indirectly gets a latino family killed by dragging the zombies' attention to their hiding place, has his phone on so it attracts a bunch of zombies so a guy dies directly as a result of his carelessness, fails to stress the importance of keeping your finger off the trigger to the doctor guy, chops some woman's arm off in hopes he doesn't have to waste a bullet on her, ignorantly lectures a guy who's lost his kid to what used to be his wife about family values and loss, etc.. [edit] Almost forgot that he's also, despite seeing looting/pillaging/violence quickly, to not only steal someone's RV, but to also shoot and kill another human being

And despite all that he still lives happily ever after without learning a single thing from his journey. Love it. You're right about him not being the perfect character that I'm making him out to be but you're only proving my point that he's generally a flat character that doesn't change and the writers don't even try to make him change. The point that alexdz makes about the movie being predictable coincides with my next point.

It really sucks to know exactly what's going to happen next. You want to be surprised and SEE where the movie is going next. But you know Brad Pitt is always going to survive so you never worry when he's in danger and you already know that everyone around him who he doesn't know is probably going to die so once again, no surprise when non-protagonist people fly out of a plane soaring through the air. The writers failed to take advantage to the audience's expectations to throw a situation we wouldn't see coming. If we grew comfortable with the protagonist surviving, they could always flip it on its head and kill his wife. AMC's The Walking Dead has no difficulty killing off characters we grow to love and it's something I love about the show. Not only would we not expect something like this, but it develops and shapes the character whose grown accustomed to his lifestyle. Just imagine what kind of emotional response Brad Pitt's character might have to show if he got a phone call that his wife or children died. Now that would make the movie interesting.

Now as for the CGI argument, I wouldn't complain about it. As I see it, bad CGI is just there as another thing to complain about if you didn't like the movie to begin with. However, what if it's a really good movie that has bad CGI? Does the movie suck just because it doesn't please you visually? In 28 Days Later the pan out views of the city looked fake but all other aspects of the movie were flawless, especially compared to a movie like Quarantine. I think I'd shut my mouth about something being visually appealing and instead judge it if it has a cruddy plot or little character development. I think everyone's just a tad bit spoiled about the need for everything seen visually to look like real-life. I think it's just as needless in video games when a game like the N64 title "007 Goldeneye" is still fun to play.

And another thing. I see a lot of people who were lambasting 28 Days Later and L4D specifically because they feature fast zombies. Let me say that this is a dumb argument just like the argument about pretty graphics. To me, it's a bias similar to gay-bashing. Just because a zombie movie has fast zombies doesn't make it a bad zombie movie and just because a zombie movie has slow zombies doesn't make it a good zombie movie. I've seen zombie movies with slow zombies and zombie movies with fast zombies that were equally terrible. Vise versa. To me, so long as it's a good movie is what matters.

Finally, allow me to suggest a superb movie to wash away the crap that Hollywood smeared all over your face. A 2008 independent horror thriller that you probably have not seen called "Pontypool". It's some real fear of the unknown stuff and the concept is pretty hard to grasp on the first view, almost like Inception.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wId1z7Sy4F4