Jessika sent to a
review of J. Michael Straczynski's script for the upcoming
World War Z movie. I absolutely loved the book; it is hands down the best zombie fiction I have ever read. Max Brooks really put his finger on what the zombie war will really be all about, from a wide variety of points of view.
It's these differing points of view that really make the story work, and part of me had grave doubts indeed about them making it work for a movie. I figured the feature film was inevitable when production companies owned by Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio got into a bidding war for the movie rights before the book even came out. You don't spend that kind of money to sit on the rights and not make a movie. I worried a bit less when I found out JMS was attached as the screenwriter.
From the sound of things, JMS got it. He understood what Brooks was doing with the non-narrative format, and has written the script in a similar fashion. The interviews have become a series of flashbacks and voice-overs, which I think will work exactly right, and is the only real way to tell this global story. I know some of the stories will have to be dropped for the script; it's the nature of the beast when making a movie. But it sounds like JMS has made smart decisions there, hopefully as smart as those made for the abridged audiobook.
What worries me, though, is the expansion of the role of the narrator/author. He's now a central character, and we're going to get the backstory of why he's writing this book. I think that is a mistake. One of the things that made the book work so very well was the lack of a single person as a central character. The author distanced himself from the story, and never spoke to his own involvement in the war. This made
humanity as a whole the protagonist in the story, and that's why it worked. It wasn't the tale of a few people, or even a single nation, and how they handled the zombie war. It was the tale of how humans as a species faced the very real threat of extinction. The global span of the story is what makes it so compelling.
I'm willing to go with it, though. I still have high hopes for the movie, especially hearing that key scenes like the Battle of Yonkers were written exactly right in the script. I'm dying to see what the end result will be.
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