World War Z – A Bookish Movie Review

As many of you could probably tell just from the trailers, the movie version of World War Z is nothing like the book. Instead of a series of interviews detailing the scientific, political, and social details of a zombie plague, this is an action-packed continuous narrative starring stay-at-home dad Brad Pitt. I was very pleased that the ethnic diversity of the original story made it into the movie. I was equally disappointed by the fact that we no longer got much of the big picture of how the world slowly reacted to the plague. Instead, Brad Pitt and his family are caught almost completely unawares by an attack of fast moving zombies that convert victims into zombies in seconds to minutes. In addition to turning almost immediately, zombies are also identifiable by their creepy white eyes. I think this eliminated a rather interesting complication from the book. Most of the changes, however, seemed like the right choice to me. Following one character throughout made me much more invested in the story and the solution to the zombie plague, while implausible, was also more clever than the brute force approach adopted in the book. Overall, this is not the book and I’m almost not sure they should have kept the name, but it was a great movie that was at least as good as the book, possibly better.