World War Z

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'm apparently the only one who thinks the movie looks more interesting than the book was. But I also thought the book was hokey and poorly written, so any deviation away from it isn't a bad thing.

*very audible gnashing of teeth is heard*

Strangeblades wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'm apparently the only one who thinks the movie looks more interesting than the book was. But I also thought the book was hokey and poorly written, so any deviation away from it isn't a bad thing.

*very audible gnashing of teeth is heard*

There might be a zombie behind you!

Nevin73 wrote:

How did the book World War Z go from regular-type people survival experiences to Brad Pitt becomes the world's only hope? It looks like Michael Bay got his talons on the script.

How did I Am Legend go from a dude hiding in a house in Compton for the entire story to Will Smith kicking around NYC? Hollywood is weird.

complexmath wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

How did the book World War Z go from regular-type people survival experiences to Brad Pitt becomes the world's only hope? It looks like Michael Bay got his talons on the script.

How did I Am Legend go from a dude hiding in a house in Compton for the entire story to Will Smith kicking around NYC? Hollywood is weird.

How did Lawnmower Man go from... on second thought, best forget about it.

complexmath wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

How did the book World War Z go from regular-type people survival experiences to Brad Pitt becomes the world's only hope? It looks like Michael Bay got his talons on the script.

How did I Am Legend go from a dude hiding in a house in Compton for the entire story to Will Smith kicking around NYC? Hollywood is weird.

Eh, In the book he still had free run of the surrounding area during the day and went out on excursions. He did spend more time hunting and simply killing the infected. But that I swallowed as not being that much of a stretch. I had far more compelling reasons to dislike the movie.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
complexmath wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

How did the book World War Z go from regular-type people survival experiences to Brad Pitt becomes the world's only hope? It looks like Michael Bay got his talons on the script.

How did I Am Legend go from a dude hiding in a house in Compton for the entire story to Will Smith kicking around NYC? Hollywood is weird.

How did Lawnmower Man go from... on second thought, best forget about it.

Lets just say that as awful and completely unrelated to the short story Lawnmower Man was, it was still better that actually witnessing how that booked ended, grass stains and all.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
complexmath wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

How did the book World War Z go from regular-type people survival experiences to Brad Pitt becomes the world's only hope? It looks like Michael Bay got his talons on the script.

How did I Am Legend go from a dude hiding in a house in Compton for the entire story to Will Smith kicking around NYC? Hollywood is weird.

How did Lawnmower Man go from... on second thought, best forget about it.

NO! YOU REMEMBER IT!

Bonus_Eruptus wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
complexmath wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

How did the book World War Z go from regular-type people survival experiences to Brad Pitt becomes the world's only hope? It looks like Michael Bay got his talons on the script.

How did I Am Legend go from a dude hiding in a house in Compton for the entire story to Will Smith kicking around NYC? Hollywood is weird.

How did Lawnmower Man go from... on second thought, best forget about it.

NO! YOU REMEMBER IT!

The past must be remembered lest we are doomed to repeat it! And nobody wants to watch that again!

Better than a Christian Bale flick!

Now compare that to this plot synopsis of the short story from Wikipedia:

Spoiler:

Harold Parkette hires Pastoral Greenery and Outdoor Services, Inc. to cut his lawn. The serviceman is not a service "man" at all but a satyr who works for the Greek god Pan. The serviceman, making good on his job to mow the lawn, conjures up an unholy, autonomous lawnmower that proceeds to mow Parkette's lawn while the serviceman, completely nude, devours the freshly cut grass. The event is terrifying and beyond the intellectual comprehension of Parkette. In a panic, he tries to call the police, but the serviceman and his diabolical lawn-mowing device proceed to brutally slaughter Parkette.

The police arrive at Parkette's house and believe that an insane nudist has killed him in a form of ritual sacrifice; they write off the occurrence as just another bizarre murder and leave, though not without noticing the powerful scent of freshly cut grass.

Is the movie really meant to be based on the story or do they just share a name?

complexmath wrote:

Is the movie really meant to be based on the story or do they just share a name?

Despite the fact that the film was originally titled Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, the film bears very little resemblance to the short story. King successfully sued the producers for attaching his name to the film and stated in court documents that the film "bore no meaningful resemblance" to his story.
SpyNavy wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
karmajay wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
karmajay wrote:
kazooka wrote:
Hobbes2099 wrote:
complexmath wrote:

Some of the scenes in that trailer are fantastic, like the one with the zombies all piling up trying to climb the wall. I'd really like to have seen an attempt at a movie in the format of the book though. I think it could be done quite effectively, but it would come across more as an indie film than the blockbuster the current one looks to be.

What you liked most is what I liked least. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the zombie representation of this movie feels "fake". I know how little sense that last sentence made.

I think one of the things that the "fast zombie" phenomenon does is evoke some real primal reactions about being chased by a large and hostile group of people. But the "swarm" behavior that we're seeing now goes into the uncanny valley in a bad way. Instead of a bunch of hostile people trying to chase you down and hurt you, it's this big quivering wave of faces falling over each other.

Yeah when it comes to zombie stuff, they have all the advantages so slow zombies give the humans a chance. No way humans make it if they are this fast. (Although in the movie I'm sure they'll pull some sh*t out of their a**..

How do you figure?

Humans have tool use, tactics, the ability to use terrain to their advantage, and the ability to coordinate and communicate with one another. All they would need is a bulldozer and a Jersey wall.

That's great when you have time and a trained force. With fast zombies an urban population is turned quickly before much can get down and now you have a million fast zombies running every where. A lot of tactics are made to discourage or stop a force when in actually this force would have to be utterly destroyed while they are running around full speed like in that clip.

Actually, no.

Militaries around the world are trained extensively in the utter destruction of opposing forces. In fact, a force that doesn't avail itself of the advantages of cover and concealment soon finds itself chopped into meat. For more evidence of this, just look up the history of Sir Beauvoir de Lisle’s 29th Division, the Newfoundland Regiment at the Somme, in which an entire regiment was chopped to meat in less than 20 minutes by what amounts to three belt fed machineguns. Toss in a 20' Jersey wall, modern firearms, and a couple crates of M67 hand grenades (especially when they bunch up so nice) and you have a rather nice experience grinder.

Mass, mobility, and overwhelming firepower are the key to large combat operations. However, I think the original book really does a good job with illustrating the mind of a soldier when an enemy (zombie) doesn't understand he is dead. Massed zombie attack with the Z's only going down when taking one to the head could easily break a unit.

Sorry. I just don't think that rates.

I don't know anyone who has ever seen combat that would be more freaked out by a sea of easily destroyed targets than they would be by sentient humans armed with modern weapons and trained to utilize tactics and terrain.

I know I have brought this up numerous times, but it bears repeating here. Absent tool use and cognitive function, the zombie threat can be dismissed simply by the limitations of physics. No matter how many zombies you have, they will never, ever, ever be capable of penetrating a reinforced concrete wall or overturn an armored vehicle. They just can not generate the pressure or leverage.

Even just simple mechanical advantage gives living humans enough of an edge to be simply insurmountable. I joke about this, but it might as well be completely accurate. All you need to get rid of millions of zombies is a wind chime, a slip-n-slide, and lawnmower blade.

Paleocon wrote:
SpyNavy wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
karmajay wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
karmajay wrote:
kazooka wrote:
Hobbes2099 wrote:
complexmath wrote:

Some of the scenes in that trailer are fantastic, like the one with the zombies all piling up trying to climb the wall. I'd really like to have seen an attempt at a movie in the format of the book though. I think it could be done quite effectively, but it would come across more as an indie film than the blockbuster the current one looks to be.

What you liked most is what I liked least. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the zombie representation of this movie feels "fake". I know how little sense that last sentence made.

I think one of the things that the "fast zombie" phenomenon does is evoke some real primal reactions about being chased by a large and hostile group of people. But the "swarm" behavior that we're seeing now goes into the uncanny valley in a bad way. Instead of a bunch of hostile people trying to chase you down and hurt you, it's this big quivering wave of faces falling over each other.

Yeah when it comes to zombie stuff, they have all the advantages so slow zombies give the humans a chance. No way humans make it if they are this fast. (Although in the movie I'm sure they'll pull some sh*t out of their a**..

How do you figure?

Humans have tool use, tactics, the ability to use terrain to their advantage, and the ability to coordinate and communicate with one another. All they would need is a bulldozer and a Jersey wall.

That's great when you have time and a trained force. With fast zombies an urban population is turned quickly before much can get down and now you have a million fast zombies running every where. A lot of tactics are made to discourage or stop a force when in actually this force would have to be utterly destroyed while they are running around full speed like in that clip.

Actually, no.

Militaries around the world are trained extensively in the utter destruction of opposing forces. In fact, a force that doesn't avail itself of the advantages of cover and concealment soon finds itself chopped into meat. For more evidence of this, just look up the history of Sir Beauvoir de Lisle’s 29th Division, the Newfoundland Regiment at the Somme, in which an entire regiment was chopped to meat in less than 20 minutes by what amounts to three belt fed machineguns. Toss in a 20' Jersey wall, modern firearms, and a couple crates of M67 hand grenades (especially when they bunch up so nice) and you have a rather nice experience grinder.

Mass, mobility, and overwhelming firepower are the key to large combat operations. However, I think the original book really does a good job with illustrating the mind of a soldier when an enemy (zombie) doesn't understand he is dead. Massed zombie attack with the Z's only going down when taking one to the head could easily break a unit.

Sorry. I just don't think that rates.

I don't know anyone who has ever seen combat that would be more freaked out by a sea of easily destroyed targets than they would be by sentient humans armed with modern weapons and trained to utilize tactics and terrain.

I know I have brought this up numerous times, but it bears repeating here. Absent tool use and cognitive function, the zombie threat can be dismissed simply by the limitations of physics. No matter how many zombies you have, they will never, ever, ever be capable of penetrating a reinforced concrete wall or overturn an armored vehicle. They just can not generate the pressure or leverage.

Even just simple mechanical advantage gives living humans enough of an edge to be simply insurmountable. I joke about this, but it might as well be completely accurate. All you need to get rid of millions of zombies is a wind chime, a slip-n-slide, and lawnmower blade.

You inject easily destroyed targets into the mix - I am referring to the scene in the book called the Battle of Yonkers and a couple of scenes in London and India. What I was driving at was if a soldier who is trained to fire center mass shoots a target that doesnt go down - thats disconcerting. Couple that with he gets infected or buddy does that can be a bit of a morale killer. I am purely talking within the book context. I am also talking on a small unit level. I agree with the physics of it all, but my point more then anything was that morale and mindset can be a funny thing and far more important then the weapons you use.

Way to over-trivialize things, Paleo!

[Apart from a socialist in the White House,] the all-but-inevitable Zombie uprising is the main driving force behind the small arms sales surge across America. Are you telling me I am a loon because I spent $2000 on an AR-15 when I could easily do with a wind chime and a lawnmower?! Why do you hate America?!

It all comes down to whether the military is given free reign or the politicians do their normal thing where they pretend that they know how something works.

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

Way to over-trivialize things, Paleo!

[Apart from a socialist in the White House,] the all-but-inevitable Zombie uprising is the main driving force behind the small arms sales surge across America. Are you telling me I am a loon because I spent $2000 on an AR-15 when I could easily do with a wind chime and a lawnmower?! Why do you hate America?!

No. I think you're an idiot for spending $2000 on an AR-15 when the going price is just about half that.

http://www.amazon.com/Wham--Surf-Rider-Slip-Slide/dp/B004XHWGCQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353007723&sr=8-1&keywords=slip+slide

http://www.amazon.com/Wham--Slide-Rider-Double-Boogies/dp/B00382GVOQ/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1353007723&sr=8-3&keywords=slip+slide

Should I get the double wide slip and slide or the single ride. Is the extra $16 worth the cost?

Should I go with wood, brass or a bamboo wind chime?

I think I will go for the Toro lawnmower blade over the black and decker, but correct me if you think I am wrong.

Paleocon wrote:
Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

Way to over-trivialize things, Paleo!

[Apart from a socialist in the White House,] the all-but-inevitable Zombie uprising is the main driving force behind the small arms sales surge across America. Are you telling me I am a loon because I spent $2000 on an AR-15 when I could easily do with a wind chime and a lawnmower?! Why do you hate America?!

No. I think you're an idiot for spending $2000 on an AR-15 when the going price is just about half that. ;)

Actually, I don't have an AR-15 at al.

P.S. and I am talking about a good, zombie-spec AR-15 here!

CannibalCrowley wrote:

It all comes down to whether the military is given free reign or the politicians do their normal thing where they pretend that they know how something works.

Agreed. The real failure at the Battle of Yonkers was that the people making the decisions were more concerned with showing off their new toys instead of actually killing zombies. They brought the wrong kind of weaponry (tanks, helicopters & jets) and even then didn't bring enough ammunition to put more than a slight dent in the horde coming out of NYC. What few ground troops they did have were an afterthought and mainly there to show-off the new net-warrior gear (which exacerbated the fear/panic of the troops by broadcasting to every soldier the POV of a soldier getting eaten by zombies.

A target not going down to body shots might be disconcerting if that's what you expected, but by that point in the book they all knew that it took headshots to kill a zed. They'd need to readjust their aiming habits, but it shouldn't have spooked them (well, not any worse than knowing that zombies were real would have spooked them).

Paleo's right that it would be easy to contain a WWZ style outbreak, provided you have the knowledge of what to do and the tools/manpower to do it. What WWZ did was outline a situation in which enough things went wrong that it became uncontrollable. Israel did nearly exactly what Paleo suggested, put up big walls, and it worked great for them. The main problem they had was that their right-wing extremists rioted because they allowed non-jews to take refuge there. The US, on the other hand, ignored the problem and had to abandon over half of the country because of it. Once we had competent people in charge (both politically and in the military), we retook the country fairly quickly.

Except that the tanks didn't even have to fire. They could have just ridden down the street and it would have been resolved in a big ol' gooey mess.

Napalm would have worked pretty well too.

Nevin73 wrote:

Except that the tanks didn't even have to fire. They could have just ridden down the street and it would have been resolved in a big ol' gooey mess.

Napalm would have worked pretty well too.

Napalm seems risky since you'd have a mass of burning zombies staggering around until the fire finally consumed the zombies' brains. Running them over with tanks seems like a pretty solid plan though.

muttonchop wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

Except that the tanks didn't even have to fire. They could have just ridden down the street and it would have been resolved in a big ol' gooey mess.

Napalm would have worked pretty well too.

Napalm seems risky since you'd have a mass of burning zombies staggering around until the fire finally consumed the zombies' brains. Running them over with tanks seems like a pretty solid plan though.

Not entirely, though napalm does a masterful job of boiling brains and making skulls pop open as a result. Even if it just set the zeds on fire, the intensity of the fire would be enough to render the bodies immobile as the combination of heat and overpressure pretty much burned all the soft tissue off the bones.

All that said, an even more solid plan would be just to drop a lot of CBM's since zombies don't avail themselves of cover or duck when under fire. A couple sticks of anti-personnel cluster bomblet munitions would pretty much shred the hell out of a concentrated mass of zombies. And since they tend to clump into swarms, CBM's would have a disproportionately high level of effectiveness against them.

Here's the true horror for you:

Spoiler:

In a world in which The Hobbit's being spin into multiple movies isn't entirely unprecedented, a WWZ sequel starring Ving Rhames is almost a certainty.

Paleocon wrote:
muttonchop wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

Except that the tanks didn't even have to fire. They could have just ridden down the street and it would have been resolved in a big ol' gooey mess.

Napalm would have worked pretty well too.

Napalm seems risky since you'd have a mass of burning zombies staggering around until the fire finally consumed the zombies' brains. Running them over with tanks seems like a pretty solid plan though.

Not entirely, though napalm does a masterful job of boiling brains and making skulls pop open as a result. Even if it just set the zeds on fire, the intensity of the fire would be enough to render the bodies immobile as the combination of heat and overpressure pretty much burned all the soft tissue off the bones.

All that said, an even more solid plan would be just to drop a lot of CBM's since zombies don't avail themselves of cover or duck when under fire. A couple sticks of anti-personnel cluster bomblet munitions would pretty much shred the hell out of a concentrated mass of zombies. And since they tend to clump into swarms, CBM's would have a disproportionately high level of effectiveness against them.

Seems like Brooks went into some detail about that. Something about the zombies burning, but the fire not actually killing them. Then again, if you'd like to argue scientific principles regarding animate corpses, then don't let me stop you.

Yeah, he commented on the ineffectiveness of anti-personnel mines too. The did a great job of causing damage, but didn't actually kill as many as you would hope for since the shrapnel would have to pierce the brain to actually kill one. His hypothetical zombie virus did something to the brain that made them much less susceptible to pressure changes than a normal human's is. They didn't get damaged from concussive shocks like we do (even if it does damage their brains, that damage doesn't affect them like it does us). Being miles under the ocean didn't affect them, nor did freezing and thawing (which would burst cells walls in a normal brain). Since anti-personnel mines would mostly just turn a bunch of walking zombies into a bunch of crawling ones, it made those that didn't die a little harder to hit, as they'd have better cover from crawling on the ground instead of walking upright.

As for napalm (or just plain fire), it worked, but took longer and was much more dangerous to use than a rifle, since it'd turn them into mobile torches until it burned enough of them away to make them immobile or destroyed the brain.

Yeah, Brooks wisely avoided talking about the impossibility of corpses being animate. Which is funny because he goes into great detail about logistics, cause and effect scenarios, food supplies, global ramifications, etc. There are several brainy characters in the book too, but no one really talks about how a corpse can move without having oxygenated blood going to the muscles, how it keeps its balance, etc.

He goes into more detail about his virus' effects on the body in his book Zombie Survival Guide.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

He goes into more detail about his virus' effects on the body in his book Zombie Survival Guide.

Yup. It's pretty cool. For all their efforts the squints (thanks TV's Bones!) can determine the virus does impossible things. It's like a new form of life that is completely alien to all forms of Earthly organisms.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

He goes into more detail about his virus' effects on the body in his book Zombie Survival Guide.

It's a virus called Solanum

Nevin73 wrote:

How did the book World War Z go from regular-type people survival experiences to Brad Pitt becomes the world's only hope? It looks like Michael Bay got his talons on the script.

I will probably watch it at some point, but not until it is on cable.

Hey everybody!!! Look at this!!! Nevin thinks Michael Bay actually uses scripts!!!!
(sorry, couldn't pass it up)