World War Z again

Again? you grumble. Hey, be grateful. I am going to end the debate that has divided business relationships, families, communities (by being that insignificant thing that hides what you're all really pissed about). Well, no, but I'm going to give it a shot, and according to various motivational memes, trying is the same thing as success even if you fail, because even if you fail you succeeded at trying, which is further than everyone else got, even though judging by the prodigiousness of these memes a lot of people are trying.

Movie or book?

That's the debate. The English Patient, Cloudatlas, Jane Eyre - I happily take up position on my chosen side of the trenches and you know exactly where this is, methinks. Or you can anticipate my unpredictability and know I am going to take up, not the opposing position, but a whole new one!

A play and a script are unhappily married, because they are just like each other, but different. Every performance of a play by every theatre company is alike but different. The way I see it, fundamentally, the stage and print are different media with different conventions and so each exists outside of their relationship too. More marriages should recognise this.

Although, Cloudatlas the movie is Ike Turner to the book's Tina.

But this isn't why you grumbled. You grumbled because I have posted about World War Z book and movie before. Such a memory, dear reader, it makes me blush. Oh, you only remember because of the poster of Brad Pitt falling from some curved horizon? Oh, that's better, it is my clever puns you remember?

Based on the scanty evidence of the poster and Wikipaedia, I declared the movie a dud. I made that tragic error that has gotten many a rich partner killed off - I forgot that the two have separate identities. Last night, I craved the catharsis of watching special FX creatures being blown up (this description has been censored for sensitive viewers) and imagining they are alive and well people - creatures. Yes. If I try to think nice thoughts about people, but the above is all that comes to me, I have still succeeded. Because they are still alive.

Nope, it is still a dud. I suspect they don't even share the same last name, because they don't share the same characters, style, themes and ending. I hesitate to say 'plot' and 'setting', because the character in the movie visits three of the same places and both Jerusalems have a wall. This actually helps to view them as having separate identities. Still a dud.

I hope they didn't pay Max Brooks much, because they used so little of his IP.

Brad Pitt neither, because they used so little of his acting talent. Ok, I can't say that for definite - I was distracted by his hair cut. It is cut in this highlighted bob that keeps waving around his cheekbones but that he never has to push out of his face. I had time to notice because of the amount of time he spent staring at the hordes of zombies instead of running, literally, for his life. Luckily because if he hadn't, humankind would never have found... a way to hide from the zombies and think soppy thoughts about trying and succeeding.

I checked and this is definitely not how the book ends.

The book is a set of interviews conducted by the Pitt character after the zombies have been contained. He works for the UN, which as we know prefers to take notes than prevent genocide. Anyway, we learn very little about the narrator, so Pitt had a blank slate there. The interviews range from military to political to personal and even spiritual. The interviews combine to create a multifaceted report that only proves there are more facets. Yet each interview is gripping in its own right - strategies, characters, perspectives.

To capture this, the movie would have been a documentary. I can't imagine Brad Pitt in a documentary any more than I understand why his hair stays so still. Nor can I imagine him taking a backseat to the story. Unless he were producing it. Then again, I would not have predicted he would act in a zombie movie.

While Pitt stared at oncoming floods of the undead, groups of multiracial and -ethnic men and women milled around talking loudly enough for us to hear their accents. The South African was genuine, so I guess the rest were too. Kudos on acknowledging that the rest of the world would suffer in an apocalypse too, which the book does nicely albeit with more range.

But by bringing the 'hero' from behind his pen, notepad and dictaphone, the movie places the burden of surviving every attack by the skin of his teeth and solving the global crisis on the poor man. What I really enjoyed about the book were the political ramifications and strategies - the ones that worked and those that didn't. This seems like an obvious hit, but I haven't seen much that forces such uncomfortable decisions on the reader without denying that they may be ethically unsound but that they worked. Luckily for this man, he has no such decisions to make, except the one that saves his skin.

The only thing the book and movie have in common is that the zombies are terrifying. In the book, they overwhelm every force that faces them, mostly by sheer mass. In the movie, the actors' actions are fast-forwarded, so that they seem even less human. They are similar to those in 28 Days Later, where the zombies are victims of their own rage rather than undead. Pitt comes face to face with one that alternately makes the sound of an eagle hunting and an alien in Alien, which is more scary than it sounds.

This feels like a light post - stop sighing with relief - because the movie is so superficial. It takes a good book and wraps it around Brad Pitt and his hair (which actually happens in the movie, now that I think of it). Then they pasted a layer of 'virus' horror/action movie in places where he still showed. As in the movie poster, the setting is contorted, while the book is realistic in so far as it is a historical record; the character is staring at the chaos, while... ok, so the protagonist of the book is also kind of staring, fixated, but through him we explore how people react to genocide. He doesn't pretend trying is succeeding.

World War Z

The book, not the movie. There's a book? There is a book. From the movie poster alone, I can tell they do not tell the same story. Well, ok, there are zombies (the book discourages this moniker, only partly tongue-in-cheek). But the story is definitely not told by Brad Pitt. (I can tell because of the accent.) And the story is in every other way almost completely different.

So, I haven't actually watched the movie. Everything in this post is anecdotal or based on Wikipedia (PS. open source geniuses, 'encyclopedia' is spelt 'encyclopaedia') or based on the movie poster with the remarkable visual illusion that we can see the curve of the earth.

The book is good. Read it. It sounds much better than the movie. It's a book, so it never is what it says it is. Or says it is about. The book is not really about zombies. To my mind, they don't feature except to propel the plot. The story is told entirely in transcripts collected by a man who works for the UN and never reveals where he was during the war. Like a professional researcher. (This isn't sarcasm or a plot hint. Researchers should really remain separate from their subject. Like anti-Jane Goodalls or -Pitts.)

This movie and its main character are just such easy bait.

Wait for it... Did you get it?

Because it is a report, World War Z is set after the zombies have been brought under control. (Hint: a zombie is by definition dead and therefore cannot be brought back to life. Gross. So yes, by massacring them.) The researcher travels around the world to meet key members of the resistance, who tell their stories, some about failures (most) and some about successes. The stories are technical, moving, military, esoteric, pathetic and disturbing.

Together they make a picture of how we behave in crises. Most of our behaviour is reactionary, I'm afraid. Some of it is a modern hubris, a belief that primordial threats guided by random desire can be destroyed by weapons and strategy, like night and the lightbulb (and a generator, obviously). Bravery is often pure instinct; but instinct is also reactionary.

Another common reaction is to blame. Most of the accusers are justified, but this is easy to say in hindsight. Again, reactionary.

It's easy to take the moral high ground in this story - become its saviour (my hint is: zombie's can't climb - get it?). I often take issue with dystopian novels, in that they assume the worst of human nature. Not all of us are going to start eating each other to prove our status in what is essentially the same world as our ancestors and animals live(d). You don't find tears running down their bones because they were hunted by lions and hyaena. That's life.

But you are at least one of these people (and no, not Brad Pitt, who from the sounds of it drags trouble behind him on a leash). The reactionaries. And, likely, a corpse.

If you protest (reactionary), consider that the novel contains hints of the HIV pandemic and racial segregation. How have you reacted when met with these 'wars'? Jumped to the front line? Sacrificed yourself? Found something else to blame? Hightailed it up a tree? (Smart.) This. Is. Life. There is some war right on your doorstep. Maybe this novel is about the worst of human nature.

Segregation was, predictably, the one I identified with the most, in both Israel and South Africa. Especially given my home town is point 0. We are introduced to the man who conceived the most effective strategy to end the war - and also the most horrific. He is a psychopath (not in the murderer sense, but in the clinical sense: he lacks emotions, which makes him a great strategist). He was also one of the architects of apartheid.

These facts alone - even without more back story - make me think twice. More times, in fact. I don't know. There is no right answer. This isn't even an issue of subjectivity. What justifies such brutality? The ends? The ends justifies the means? I can't endorse that. But do I want us (humanity) to live or die? I would have said I didn't care - this is life - but then why am I turning this around in my brain?

Again, take note that I have not watched the movie (although in a sense I have because I have watched other such things featuring other such headline names). Yet, I have a string of other jokes to tell and disjunctions to point out. But that is less interesting (?) than the conclusion of this movie and another, and their books. In I am Legend utopia follows in the wake of dystopia. So much work to be done blah pop another grape in my mouth.

This is life. Life doesn't award you some oasis in green and leafy parks, at the centre of which is the Fountain of Youth. (Fittingly mythical, but one that men with an eye on knighthood killed themselves to... not find.) Life (my life, at least) is philosophical crises, as well as physical ones. Some personal and some social. What is humanity? Where do you fit in? And what would you do to maintain your status quo? Is it worth maintaining?