Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.
I didn’t really want to watch World War Z for a number of reasons. The primary one is that I’ve read the book, and Max Brooks’s episodic novel is absolutely the best piece of zombie literature that has been produced, at least to my knowledge. It’s smart, it covers the zombie plague from several dozen perspectives, it offers real, human heroes and villains, and manages to be politically incisive as well as entertaining. The minute I realized that the movie was going to be an action movie with zombies, I threw my hands up in disgust. That’s not what Max Brooks wrote.
What Brooks wrote—and I can’t recommend the book enough—is a survivors’ oral history. The book posits that the zombie war is over and has been more or less won, humanity having started pushing back against the undead and reclaiming territory. The book is a series of interviews with survivors at all levels: government officials, children, doctors, soldiers. Each person has a particular perspective on what happened and survived in his or her own way. The story goes from the opening moments of the plague, one of the first victims in rural China to the clearing of the American continent, the rescue of pockets of survivors, and the continued cleansing of the planet from the undead menace.
