When There Is No More Room In Development Hell: World War Z Trailer Released

Between our choice to cover the Hellblazer cancellation yesterday and our decision afterwards to pour out a couple in memorium of the book (and if we filtered the pours through our kidneys, well, we didn’t come here for a semantics argument, and it’s the thought that counts, and fuck you, anyway), we missed the release of the first trailer for the upcoming movie World War Z, based on the Max Brooks novel.

If you read the original book, you know the conceit is that it’s an oral history of an old-school, Romero-style slow zombie apocalypse, told years after the world pulled together, changed the nature of military tactics to deal with shambling ghouls who can only be killed by a bullet to the head, and won the war.

And if you watch this trailer, you’ll see that, well, this is none of those things.

So the movie version of World War Z is clearly gonna go with fast zombies – zombie so fast they make the ones from 28 Days Later look like they’re rocking a serious quaalude habit. That is one hell of a decision, considering that a huge part of the book is how humanity turns the tide by finally understanding that they are dealing with an enemy who moves slowly and dies from a bullet to the head, meaning that literally anyone who could learn to fire a .22 rifle could rock the front lines effectively. You’re not gonna see that when it’s a Goddamned swarm coming at you at 40 miles per hour.

None of that means that the movie is gonna be bad; fast zombies just means that there will need to be a different conceit to turn the tide against the zombies unless they’ve changed so much that the human race falls in the movie… which, on one level, seems unlikely as it would render this World War Z in name only. However, considering J. Michael Straczynski talked about his script draft and Brad Pitt’s involvement in the movie project at San Diego Comic-Con as far back as 2009 (sorry, no link; I was just there to watch him talk about it), and that Straczynski’s script got chucked and completely rewritten, and then that there were two months of last-minute reshoots happened in starting in June, and there is a very real chance that this is not going to be the movie that we fans of the original Max Brooks story (which I own in first-edition hardcover as well as in audiobook) were hoping for… and that seems unlikely to threaten Romero’s original Dead trilogy in terms of quality.

With all that said, the almost liquid nature of the zombies in full swarm is a cool and captivating effect, and I am a sucker for a half-decent zombie story, so I will see this. But my hopes for a true World War Z adaptation are pretty much out the window with this trailer.

World War Z will be in theaters on June 21st, 2013.