Originally posted at the Nerds of Color:
I don’t know when zombies became cool, but they sure took off some time in the last five years. They’re everywhere: on TV, in video games, in comics, in cell phone commercials, in corporate for-profit adventure/mud-running events. It kind of makes me wish zombies were a publicly traded stock option. I could have invested my savings years ago and made millions before the zombie bubble bursts.
One of the landmark works in the contemporary zombie zeitgeist (oh yeah, I totally just put all those words together into a sentence) is Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which I haven’t read, because I suck. Also, because it doesn’t have pictures, and I like my “fun read” books to have pictures in them.
But according to Wikipedia, the World War Z novel is a multi-perspective story that documents the global battle against a zombie apocalypse. It’s supposed to be really good. I do plan on reading it someday.
So, a few years ago, when it was first rumoured that a live-action adaptation of World War Z was in pre-production, a lot of zombie nuts went nuts. And then, when the movie dropped, those zombie nuts went even more nuts because it was nothing like the World War Z book (which it’s not). The film strips away 90% of the storyline to focus on Brad Pitt’s character, and also loses the global voices of the actual, y’know, world war. Instead, the movie becomes (in the mind of critics) just another zombie movie where the hunky White guy saves the world. Which, on this point, it kind of is.
Except, I submit this controversial counter-argument for your consideration — and just in time for the movie’s blu-ray release — World War Z is also the best zombie movie ever.
