One of the most infamous "In name only" adaptations of all time. What can it teach us? Patreon: / jamestullos Twitter: / fortullos goodreads: / james-tullos
The book: once bitten, it takes an average of 24 hours for an adult to succumb to death, then fully reanimate as a zombie. The movie: dude becomes a rabid zombie 12 SECONDS after he gets bitten by a zombie GAS GAS GAS GOTTA STEP ON THE GAS
Brooks is very meticulous about laying down the ground rules for his zombies, it's a critical part of his story. Changing it so dramatically would be like a lord of the rings adaptation without elves where the orcs were the good guys. It just can't a shouldn't be done.
If you didn't watched the movie hoping it would follow the book it was good. I didn't knew about the book and imo it was one of the very well made zombie movie ever.
I really wish Netflix remake this as a documentary- style series. The format would be perfect. Edit: It would be an incredibly relevant sci-fi series for a post-covid world.
To be honest, you can't make a movie out of World War Z. The intricacies of its overarching plots and the span of its events makes it impossible just to pick and choose. You'd be better off making a TV series instead... which honestly wouldn't be a bad idea.
@@CapoRip actually there's quite a bit of action in the book. There's also kind of a pseudo 3 act structure where the stories all have a very clear ramping of intensity toward the middle, before a climax and falling action where we revisit the story tellers and have a bookend to their present-lives.
@@Bloodhurl67 except that is literally what happens. At each place he finds info on the next place to go. That's it. There isn't anything more to see or read into. That's all there is.
That is the exact play by play of the movie There's no quiet moment in that film It's always hey we made it we're safe. And 2 seconds later it's back to Oh no zombies! RUN! SHOOT! RUN! SHAKY CAM! BRAD PITT! BACK TO RUNNING!
Movie Artemis wears a hoodie and jeans. That alone is enough to ruin the movie. Artemis's fashion sense is a key part of his obnoxious, overly-formal personality.
@@t.estable3856 Mario Bros, Dragon Ball Evolution, House of the Dead dude. In general video game to film adaptations and anime to live adaptations are worse. It's just that people didn't even watch them.
This Book is so amazing. You just said Yonkers and I immediately got "flashbacks" of how horrible everything in that battle was because of how vivid it was written.
The battle itself is absolutely ludicrous from a military viewpoint though. The rioters at Minneapolis should have been able to take down those slow-moving, melee-only undead punks and yet the US military get their asses handed to them on a silver platter? At the same time, these grunts are the ones who thought that confronting a slow-moving enemy that can be only lethal through direct touch should best be done in narrow streets because the more exposure to getting cornered, the better I guess.
yarpen26 I felt the same way, but it’s creative fiction in the end. Actually my feelings about a zombie pandemic are the same: given the amount of zombie movies and the amount of guns and weapons people have around the US, I feel like an actual zombie apocalypse would be over quickly. I’d be more afraid of real viruses TBH.
@@cccycling5835 Which is why most books and stories now a days the zombies are faster and also the virus tens to be airborne to some extent in order to spread, the movie was crap in order to get the spread they ahve the infection rates are all over the places going from days to seconds
@@yarpen26 well, the difficulty that the military had at the start of the pandemic and during yonker is kinda explain . It was hot summer, in full gear, bullet proof jacket, gaz mask, standing under the sun for hours before the battle start, and with helmet camera showing to your squad leader what's happening (like being eaten alive), withouth training against this target (the z) and with the media in the leg making the logistic difficult . It tell that hitting the head of the dead was difficult (no trainig), wich is true, soldier are train to it the body, not the head .
@@lawdmcchicken5635 it was predictable, and constantly predicted. China has a sanitary crisis since the CCP took over, if not before, the CCP are hostile to all foreign nations, and there was already a migrant crisis worldwide. It was bound to happen, and was poorly handled.
While World War Z the book had flaws, I would have found its format more interesting than what we got in the film, which was just a generic zombie action flick.
That was the whole appeal of the book anyway, it was popular due to its unique format and scope. The movie failed to me because it left the best parts of what made the book appealing behind
It would be gorgeous as a "documentary", like full lo-fi found footage-ish where there is the exchange between the interviewed and interviewer and then suddenly, with a particular zoom on the expression of the survivor we see glimpses of the event.
Boy, I would pay from my own pocket to see a decent actress portray the pilot that was guided by Mets Fan, like: the uncertainty in her eyes, the standoffish nature after the narrator afirmates that they never found a Mets Fan, the unreliability of her tale! The human factor. It would be a blast.
How about this, a post-apocalyptic where settlers in the outback live in constant fear of ferocious, near invincible emus. Think Attack on Titan but Australian.
LOVED the line about World War Z removing "the heart soul and lungs then revived[ing] its corpse with necromancy to make a thrall that will be obedient to the whims of focus group testing." SO GOOD. Also, I would also add Ender's Game to this list. The book is a masterpiece about war and child soldiers and humanity and the movie is... not. Also Asa Butterfield was too old to play Ender.
The movie follows the book I thought pretty closely, the themes were all still thier but the pacing was so fast that the whipped by without leaving a real impact. It was a serviceable film but utterly forgettable. Sort of book that would need a miniseries to do it justice.
Ender's Game needed to be a miniseries to get it right but the movie was alright just it felt it was trying to fit 20 pound plus story in a 10 pound movie
TBH I hated Ender’s Game when I read it in middle school. And Orson Scott Card can’t write children; I should have known, because I was one. I understand that the ending had a point despite the fact that it merely annoyed me at the time, but Ender acts like he’s 13, not 6. The recast was fitting, because there’s no way in hell an actual 6-year-old can act like that.
@@wannabehistorian371 that's the point, though--the kids in the book are the best of the best, not kidlike at all. They're much smarter than the rest of the world's kids because they've been bred that way. Of course they don't act like kids. They were never meant to.
The ensemble cast audiobook of WWZ is one of my favorite listening experiences of all time. Every interview has a different actor as the narrator, and they're all incredible. I'd argue that it's the best way to experience World War Z that currently exists.
Considering it's an 'oral history'... I'm picturing History Channel style series, with interviews in a studio office and the sequences that aren't interviews? "As portrayed by our actors" in white text at the bottom of the screen. That way you can go fairly cheap on the budget for action sequences because it's, in show, a recreation of previous events by actors.
I think that the perfect way to adapt World War Z would to make a HBO style mini series. We can make the series into 6 to 7 episodes with each chapter getting its own episode except for "The Great Panic" which can made into 2 episodes due to the Battle of Yonkers. Have the story of the show follow the book where the Journalist goes around the world and interviews some survivors. When interviewing a survivor, we get a flashback detailing that they experienced during the war.
Probably one of the least loyal yet best adaptations is how to train your dragon, as a fan of the books the only thing they kept was a bunch of names and yet they improved on the original source material a TON The books weren't even that good, the first 9 at least
I thought V for vendetta was a better movie then graphic novel. Stardust too was a great movie that significantly altered its source material, book is still great too but thier so different from each other.
I thought the same. I don't even remember what the issue was, something like pacing and exposition, but I couldn't read more than two before giving up. The author, Cressida Cowell, actually really likes the movie and thinks it stays true to the themes of the books.
@@TheUltimoSniper I find that there isn't much to them untill the very end, the first 9 seem almost formuliac just because nothing changes until the end of the 9th book in spite of having very different stories. I wouldn't say it stays to the themes of the books very well beyond Hiccup himself who is the one thing that stayed the same in adaptation however the dragons are treated very differently
@@wartang Oh I forgot about that one. It's been a while since I read the book (time to go digging) The stories that I remember the most were the evacuation of St. Petersberg, the AWOL Chinese sub, and the Parisian catacombs.
@@wartang my favorites would definitely be the story of the otaku in Japan. Here in the U.S., we tend to have access to weapons easily(hell, there's a gun store just down the street for me) but in Japan, he was stuck in a city packed with people with only a melee weapon. Kind of terrifying to me!
Max Brooks did a great little talk about how he actually enjoyed the movie because it was so utterly divorced from his book that he simply wasn't watching an adaptation of it at all, he was just watching some random zombie movie: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-WXFdO3DwRLY.html
I love that he said that, cuz that's totally how I felt watching the Deathnote movie. It was SO different, I couldn't really take offense and just saw it as a silly drama that wasn't bad to look at.
The book was amazing, a truly original take on the overdone zombie formula. Studio: "We like the title... didn't read the book but slapped it on another movie we wrote called zombie fuck'n mess".
Imagine the scene at Yonkers from that soldiers point of view. The tanks and artillery letting loose on the horde and doing jack. Everybody being linked up and the screaming/panicking on the line as the zombies make their first contact. Or the view from the sub on the ocean floor covered in zombies.
If by some miracle a miniseries is made to be accurate to the book, Yonkers should be shot as a "Found Footage" episode with the POV of a soldier's helmet cam.
Im glad you made a video about this book. They turned a unique mockumentary style book about the geopolitical effects of a zombie outbteak into a typical run and gun zombie movie
@@kittykittybangbang9367 heck it was based on the original SARS outbreak back in the early 2000s China pulled the same crap with that too. It just didn't get as bad.
Someone should make a War of the Worlds in-name-only adaptation where the aliens invade to set up a puppet government to extract resources and arm local insurgent groups to destabilize the region
The aliens should probably give weapons to religious extremists too. That way they could fight them later in a never ending war to pose themselves as "the good guys" to humanity and let their more and more authoritatian politics go over without anyone complaining.
What was on my mind as I was watching the video was that this is very much akin to the story of Half-Life - the only problem is that with the series' very understated worldbuilding and storytelling, none of it ever really rises up to the surface to be immediately seen and understood by the player. Still, you've got different factions within an incomprehensibly advanced alien civilisation who have been acting in secret within our society for who knows how long, before after engineering the collapse of our governments they then come along to install a replacement, puppet government with the ostensible purpose of seeing if we're going to be able to fit into their civilisation - and of adjusting us to fit if it turns out that we're not. As for what their real goals are... S̶p̶o̶i̶l̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶l̶e̶r̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶l̶o̶n̶i̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶i̶r̶ ̶c̶o̶l̶o̶n̶i̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶.̶
There was a tv series that was quite popular I think in the 80s that kind of did that (with the main character realizing what the aliens were doing.) It was called V and when they tried to remake it in 2000s, it didn't work out very well....
World war z book: insightful analysis of society seen through the lense of a devastating world shattering event that transform lives but also the way nations interact with themselves. World War z movie: Brad Pitt and zombies.
They actually asked Brooks to write the screenplay and he refused. I've always wondered if Pitt was annoyed by that so he fucked it up on purpose (still making a movie that would sell) I have to assume that if they wanted Brooks to write it, that the original intent was to make a faithful adaptation.
I'm with the author Max Brooks on this one: the movie is so devoid of anything from the book except the barest of details that you can pretty much see it on its own. However, I wish the movie was actually good. As a zombie movie, it kinda sucked for me.
I was so annoyed after seeing the movie, because I had read the book years back and I was super excited to see how they would adapt it on screen. When I realised they hadn't, I felt played. They took the title of a much loved book and said it was an adaptation, which is the only reason I watched it. It was false advertising, if you ask me.
"Wow! You managed to adapt that book into a screenplay!? How? There's so many characters and situations, how did you manage to tie it all together?" "I decided to focus on Gerry Lane. I found his story the most compelling." "Oh... I see. You didn't didn't read the book, did you?" "Not so much."
@@arturohernandez473 it never really got popular out of the UK from what I understand. It was doomed to fail. One of my English teachers let me borrow her copies she picked up abroad. I loved the series as a kid and opted out of seeing the movie. Glad I did. Reread it, they could do the books justice if they wanted. Hester is supposed to be ugly, that's the whole point! Throwing a faded scar on a grown ass woman doesn't work. From what I understand they fucked up Shrike pretty bad too.
There is a 3rd class of adaptation: The re-imagining/re-contextualizing/re-framing of a story in order to highlight a different perspective in that story or to challenge us to think about the way the original work.
The way I think it should have been done is to have the interviewer in a room with each person one at a time and go into a flash back of the events from that person's point of view.
I thought the movie as imaginary version of books story about dealing with the outbreak in USA. In the book, people were told to wait and stay safe when heroes (scientists and government in the book, Brad in the movie) deal with the problem. In movie, solution is found after action-packed character story and world is saved. In book, the whole "seeking for solution" was just a grand plan for preventing panic and buying time for evacuation of as many people as possible behind rocky mountains. I think your thoughts on movies inspired by (but not based on) source material fit this case, World War Z movie was basically very expensive fanfiction.
In a perfect world it would have been a HBO series with a bottomless budget. Have it framed just like the book through a journalist globe trotting a post war world and then have the episode revolve around a story. All 5 season would be each stage of the war. Imagine an entire season of stories from The Great Panic. I really wish they didn't sully this property's name with this shit film. I hold a genuine grudge with Brad Pitt for being involved in it because someone had to have handed him the book at some point and he either didn't care to read it or actively ignored everything about it.
@Habadashery Jones RE: "I hold a genuine grudge with Brad Pitt for being involved in it because someone had to have handed him the book at some point and he either didn't care to read it or actively ignored everything about it." Brad Pitt was not to blame. He's merely an actor, after all. An actor simply reads the lines he is given. In my opinion, the real blame lies with the producer(s), the director and the screenwriter(s). They're the ones who made the decisions that turned a great book into a formulaic, cliche-ridden huge pile of bovine feces.
5 seasons is a bit much. And plus I think some of the stories wouldn't be very grand for viewers. Like that story if the soldier who is hallucinating. I just don't think a stand alone episode on that would be received well However to make it more of a spectacle they could potentially create new stories. Preferably with the great panic. The "Great Panics" in zombie books and media is always the best part
My favorite scene in the book is when we get to the former ISS guys in Sydney. The way he and his crew witnessed everything was really amazing in my opinion. From the Battle of Yonkers, to Iran and Pakistan nuking each other, and even to the Second Chinese Civil War. Fucking brilliant
the whole book is a masterpiece but the best story from it was by far the one talking about fighting the zombies by forming the raj singh square and the sandlers which supplied you with ammo.
Jumper is another book to movie adaption where a lot of things where changed to make it more of a blockbuster. The movie actually made me checkout the book and I enjoyed both
This is why I, as an author, recoil in disgust when people imply a film adaptation of my work. In fact one of the few times I felt personally offended online was when someone said "I'll wait for the movie to come out." That's how I realized I had to start purging fake friends from my circle.
@@SergioLeonardoCornejo Hello.I m kind of curious.In which other media aside from your own books would you like yo see your stories adapted to?(Audiobooks,comics,mini series etc)
@@HipstaHobbit sorry for not seeing your message until now. No reply alert appeared. My novels are meant to be adapted to anime, video games, and manga.
WWZ is one of my favorite stories for the themes that often aren't explored well in most media (human ingenuity, the injustice of nature and ; the way it goes about being very episodic but with the several overarching characters and plots would be so great for a miniseries or something. I can't stand the movie; I am sure it is actually an okay movie, but the fact that it's existence will probably prevent that series from ever existing is painful to me.
They could've called the movie something else and avoided paying Max Brookes altogether. It's so different, he wouldn't even think it was a ripoff of his novel. The narrative decisions and changes they made are baffling.
A War of the Worlds TV adaptation actually aired in the UK last year. It made various changes that didn’t make sense (e.g. making the Martians really agile rather than being encumbered by the higher gravity of Earth). It was set in the Edwardian era but as far as reflecting the current climate goes, it seemed to be criticising British nationalism following Brexit. Funny, really, how the best adaptation of The War of the Worlds is a rock opera.
Also, the anti-imperialist criticism of the BBC adaptation was about as subtle as a nuclear bomb in the face, and by that, I mean a minute-long rant by Rafe Spall.
Based on what I've read about the movie, there was a germ of an interesting idea that could have maintained some of the spirit of the WWZ book: that the zombies, now made to be fast and dynamic instead of slow and horde-focused, would represent a natural disaster, or the outcomes of a crisis like climate change. The say that no disaster is ever fully natural: rather, the consequences of a major event like a hurricane, wild fire, etc. exposes the fault lines already inherent in a society, where all too often the poor and vulnerable are exposed to the worst outcomes while the rich remain in relative safety (see: New Orleans post-Katrina, which populations are most at risk with sea level rise, etc.). A film that used a zombie outbreak to explore this could have been pretty powerful, looking at how different cultures and societies responded to the crisis and show where their strengths and weaknesses were in their treatment of their populations. But yes, it seems the film instead got the ol' "we need a huge blockbuster, focus group this thing to death" Hollywood treatment, again just going by what I've read on the topic, which didn't result in a bad movie but did lead to an unfulfilling adaptation.
If the script for this video is an indication, you are one hell of a writer yourself, James. The metaphors about the heart, soul and lungs were amazing!
I was so confused when I read they were adapting The Snowman, cause like, this book is so centered around Harry and his relationships, it's so personal to the main character, that if even if you start reading the books with this one you'll be a bit confused or detached. Yes, every book has it's own little contained mystery in it, but Harry's life keeps moving and you need to have read the other books to know what's going on in his personal life. That's litteraly one of the reasons everyone keeps reading these books, we're engrossed with Harry Hole's personal life. The Snowman was the worst book to adapt first.
The book and the movie resembled each other so little that they could have changed the movie to "Zombie war" and of been fine. Why did they even bother acquiring the license in the first place?.
I’m terrified of the new PJO series that’s been announced. Also James I respect your efforts here, but I would like to respectfully disagree on one point. What you said about bad adaptations not damaging the source material. While I agree that the original will still exist obviously, I do disagree with the idea that an adaptation turning out unfaithful isn’t a bad thing. Adaptations help bring the story to a wider audience and even into mainstream awareness. When an adaptation is made unfaithfully, it destroys the possibility of the story being brought to a mainstream audience. Percy Jackson, if the movies were done faithfully would be respected by the mainstream and more people would talk about it just like Harry Potter. When a bad adaptation is made, you need to decide if loosing that potential for bringing the story into the mainstream is worth it for the movie you got. In the case of PJO they just made a cash grab. In the case of How to Train Your Dragon they still made a good movie, but it did still loose that potential for bringing the story of the books to a wider audience and allowing fans to see the story properly adapted. The question is was it worth it. Then there is Shadowhunters which I don’t how to classify. Just my 2 cents.
Idk if you watched the Netflix series. On its own it's a fair series, but the movie is surprisingly more accurate to the books. Which...is odd. All the nuance and character arcs are lost.
Apparently, Rick Riordan is going to play an active role as a producer, so he'll likely be pretty insistent that certain parts remain more accurate to the book.
One thing that definitely hasn’t aged well is the idea that the global community is just gonna ignore a virus as serious as that. The bit about a secret spread via government cover up was pretty spot on though.
WWZ the book is an all time favourite of mine. The film has little/nothing to do with the book. It was a good movie for me but should’ve had a different name as it was inspired by the book at best. Still wish someone would make a series based on the book.
Ironically enough, the American 'War of the Worlds' films which changed the time and place the story was set, still did a much better job of adapting the book than the BBC miniseries which was set in early 1900's England, was not at all subtle about making Wells' views on empire and religion its main themes and sucked utterly and completely.
I read the book twice before the movie came out, but the things that stand out to me are when they fled north and the Zombies. were frozen. There was plenty of food, and it was like a big camping trip until food got low. Then it was a free for all, and then the zombies thawed. Then the part in Louisiana where they are trying to get up to that long bridge, but in the process are running by abandoned cars. Some with supplies, some with trapped grabber. Then making it up to the bridge. I drive on that long bridge. I call it the Zombie bridge. Then the pet where Nelson Mandela teams up with a defeated white supremacist former foe, to use his harsh battle plan that would have originally been used against him, that grouped people in large fortified groups, and other smaller bait groups. All those stories would have been bad ass episodes in a multipart series.
Being a huge fan of the book I highly agree altough this explanation also serves as a lens to why the tokyo ghoul anime adaptation was so bad. The problem is not that they changed the plot the problem was that they changed kaneki the main character who is honestly the main draw of the series and turned him into something completely different for the worse.
Your assessment about changes in doctrine leading to something resembling victory reminded me that there are many great ideas in this book. One that stuck out was how landmines are worse than ineffective, as all they do is blow off a zombie's legs, effectively turning _them_ into a mine. 6:14 It's our pleasure.
James you are my hero. The pains and torture you endure for the fans to review books. I'd really like to see your review on the vampire book Crave which is getting its own movie.
Can you imagine how awesome a film would be based on the *actual* book WWZ? Things like the Battle of Yonkers or seeing how each nation fights back against the zombie hordes! I feel we were robbed of something that could have been groundbreaking.
To me, one of the biggest middle finger to me with a movie doing this was, "Starship Troopers". I LOVED that book, so when I heard that they were making a movie about it, I was really excited. Then I saw it. The movie wasn't even the same story as the story in the book. One of the characters was given a sex change just so we could have boobs in the shower and a sex scene. Gone was the iconic power armor that the soldiers were supposed to use. Gone was the entire war with the Skinnies. The book was about the future of the military. With the power armor, and weapons, one soldier was supposed to be equal to one battalion of today's army. It seemed like the people who made the movie saw the movie, "Aliens" and said, "We want a clone of that, but we can't call it Aliens. We need a recognized name to slap on this movie. OH!!! There's this classic sci-fi book called "Starship Troopers! Buy the name!". They didn't even bother to READ the damn book! They just read the description on the back of the book! And the bigger middle finger was that... people who watched the movie who never read the book, or didn't know that it was a book, loved the movie. But the movie was an absolute insult to ANYONE who read the book and wanted a movie based on it. There's almost NOTHING in common between the book and the movie. NOTHING!!! I'm a HUGE proponent of, "If you can't figure a way to tell the story that's in the book, the way it's told in the book, then don't make a movie of it!". There's some movies where they just... lose the entire focus of what the book was trying to convey. Starship Troopers.. Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame, where they made the insane decision to make Quasimodo a happy hero, and the town leans a life lesson. Movies like these just.. kill anything that the books were trying to get across. They're so insulting to people who have read the books.
Although the case is similar to wwz, starship troopers isn't totally a bad movie because it has a relatively hidden satire of facism, meanwhile wwz movie was just a hollywood generic zombie movie
starship troopers however is an INTENTIONAL fuck you to the book, because the book is a piece of fascist propaganda and the director of the movie intentionally set out to ridicule the detestable ideology of the book.
This is the definition of "I just wanted the rights to the title." Obviously WWZ wouldn't have worked as a movie. But in today's age? It would have been (and could still be) a great tv show on a streaming network. It's pretty much gold for that kind of thing. And wouldn't demand nearly the same budget as some things. I don't care about the movie, but I do lament that this is the adaptation of a pretty decent book.
I watched WWZ during Covid in 2020 and liked it a lot, then over the summer of this year I listened to the audiobook, and holy shit is the book just the best piece of zombie media, while the movie just steals the title and does something entirely different. It's such a crying shame that now we won't get a proper adaptation of the best zombie story ever written. I really can't recommend the book enough regardless. Even if you dont like zombies, I think you'll still find something to love, whether it's the way the story is told or the immaculate world building.
Who framed Roger rabbit and fight club is one of those rare cases that thw authors publicly said that the film adaptation was batter than the og books..thats take a real balls for someone to say it on thier on creation
*Listening to him describe how the zombie apocalypse got so bad, due to government incompetence, capitalist interests, and individual selfessness* God I wish I couldnt relate
i was with you all the way till you mentioned Dune. i'm 350 pages into that and still don't understand why people enjoy, revere and praise that book. it's slow, and even the scenes where major events happen are so slow and nonsensically contrived with a ton of talking and thoughts. i... i don't understand lol
You gotta have the right mindset to really get Dune. You just might not be the kind of person that the book was written for, or you're approaching it incorrectly.
I would imagine you do a series just like the book. Max visits various locations around the world, we get glimpses of the post victory world, and then tell the story in flashbacks, in the form of Max and his interviewees narration. Just like in the book, some characters would be interviewed multiple times, others a one-off. You could have certain characters appear in other parts of the story to make it feel more interconnected. In the right hands it could be really great. Almost an anthology series, but not quite... I don't know if any other show quite like what I'm describing has ever been seen. It's actually a lot like Citizen Kane. We're told the outcome and basic beats of the story right at the beginning with the news reel, then through a series of interviews, we get the much more grounded, personal account of the events.
When you talk about certain images not translating to film like H.P Lovecraft, it made me think of annihilation. The build up to the doppelgänger laid out beforehand and the reveal and battle in the book terrified me. I got chills imagining what that looked like, or if I was in that situation. And I knew it would happen, because I watched the movie first. For whatever reason, the doppelgänger scene in the movie wasn’t scary at all. The doppelgänger reveal just did nothing for me. Idk why it didn’t translate on screen but it just didn’t.
What was wrong with the book? A virus coming out of China and killing people around the world? Oh wait, that happened. Maybe a slow government response resulting in more death? Nope, that happened too. Or maybe people panicking and making things worse? Or morons thinking the virus isn't real? See where this is going?
The only reason I read the book was because I was given a copy of Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Handbook as a gag gift and read it cover to cover in one night. I loved the section at the end about the history of the virus, different eras of human history dealing with it. From the ancient Romans to French Foreign Legion, American Indians, and even modern U.S. When I saw this book was also out, I picked it up and read it cover to cover in one sitting. The movie was okay, but it wasn't World War Z.
You should check out The Expanse for a great adaptation that still changed a lot of plot points while managing to keep the themes (and and few times, expressing them even better)
