Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => The Speakeasy: OOG/Off-topic Discussion => Topic started by: Sakura Nihil on 23 Jun 2013, 20:11
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Anyone else seeing this? I was kind of worried it would be a letdown after hearing about the long production troubles, but I went and saw it today, and it pleasantly surprised me. Going to try and convince a few of my work friends to see it again with me.
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I read the book and am interested in how they'll work it into a movie.
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I read the book and am interested in how they'll work it into a movie.
Go watch it, it's in theatres now.
They did pretty well with the setting and several characters (Jurgen Warmbrunn, for instance). They only tapped a fraction of a book, though, things like Yonkers are missing - however, apparently they've already given the green-light for a sequel to be made.
:P
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My zombie fanatic friend has boycotted the film based on the trailers. Not read the book myself, but by his account, they removed a lot of the basic details of how the zombies worked in favour of silly overdone nonsense.
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I liked the audio book (It go a lot of awards, and it has Mark Hamill in it).
Something about Brad Pitt turns me off, can't be arsed to watch anything with him (or his wife) in it.
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Ironically, while the book bugged me a great deal, the movie may fall into the category of 'mindless but pleasantly distracting silliness to watch while bored'. I'll not be paying for a theater ticket, though.
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Go watch it, it's in theatres now.
They did pretty well with the setting and several characters (Jurgen Warmbrunn, for instance). They only tapped a fraction of a book, though, things like Yonkers are missing - however, apparently they've already given the green-light for a sequel to be made.
:P
That is...regrettable.
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Something about Brad Pitt turns me off, can't be arsed to watch anything with him (or his wife) in it.
Go watch 12 Monkeys, like right now. :o
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Something about Brad Pitt turns me off, can't be arsed to watch anything with him (or his wife) in it.
Go watch 12 Monkeys, like right now. :o
This.
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Something about Brad Pitt turns me off, can't be arsed to watch anything with him (or his wife) in it.
Go watch 12 Monkeys, like right now. :o
This.
Fight Club is a thing that will be underrated for many years and a joy to discover for generations to come.
RE: Zombies, I enjoyed the book quite a bit but from what I've been told just pretend this movie is a separate thing only sharing a name.
They SHOULD do the book proper, but as a multi-episodic mini series, each episode a different tale from the book. Win.
Also the very idea of doing an edited for violence and gore PG-13 zombie movie to hit that widest target audience makes me want to punch someone in the face.
The other thing.... don't get me wrong I love zombie stuff, I love the genre, but most of the time I just can't deal with the idea of any organized military being overrun by walking dead.
The best modern militaries are full of hundreds of thousands of people with guns designed to kill other people with guns and explosives -shooting- at them, to incinerate many square miles from long distances.
If soldiers can handle killing people shooting at them they can handle walking corpses and laugh about it.
....I am confident that many thousands of people pointing automatic weapons, artillary, etc at shambling corpses would be over in about 15 seconds. Many civilians and urban areas would be screwed for sure, but when battle lines are drawn and proper military formations drawn up it would be a joke.
Also the one thing about apocalyptic movies we never see, is that after civilization collapses, you better believe everyone is going to just ride bicycles and laugh at zombies trying to catch up. Bicycles don't look as cool when you are wandering through the wasteland, but that'd be the primary mode of travel fo sho.
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I think in the book they explained why the modern military does not work well against the Zs.
They are trained to shoot at the body mass and not the head.
Therefore anything they do with their new fangled guns is a moot point, because the Zs will just keep on coming.
Incinerating football fields of Zs sounds good and dandy, except when they are among the civilian population.
Even smart bombs have a tendency to hit civilian targets, anything that is designed for area of effect will decimate the civilians and the Zs, alongside the infrastructure.
Of course one of the immersion breaking things is the decay of the Zs and how it affects them.
It is dealt with in the book, alongside most of the problems with the genre.
All we need in the Western world is to have a blackout that lasts about a month, about a month worth of problem with food logistics and water logistics and we are facing an extinction level event, civilization is a fragile thing and the fact that you might have to destroy the infrastructure and the civilians to kill of the enemy would pretty much mean the end of it.
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I think in the book they explained why the modern military does not work well against the Zs.
They are trained to shoot at the body mass and not the head.
Therefore anything they do with their new fangled guns is a moot point, because the Zs will just keep on coming.
Incinerating football fields of Zs sounds good and dandy, except when they are among the civilian population.
Even smart bombs have a tendency to hit civilian targets, anything that is designed for area of effect will decimate the civilians and the Zs, alongside the infrastructure.
Of course one of the immersion breaking things is the decay of the Zs and how it affects them.
It is dealt with in the book, alongside most of the problems with the genre.
All we need in the Western world is to have a blackout that lasts about a month, about a month worth of problem with food logistics and water logistics and we are facing an extinction level event, civilization is a fragile thing and the fact that you might have to destroy the infrastructure and the civilians to kill of the enemy would pretty much mean the end of it.
I disagree with the author's take on it; didn't agree with his assertions. Obviously the book would be no fun otherwise :P
Two thousand years ago you had armies with a hundred thousand people swinging swords dealing with another army of a hundred thousand people running at them -with swords-.
If the Romans could handle thousands of people running at them with swords and horses trying to kill them I think we will be just fine.
Re: power going out, it would certainly be a huge mess, but don't forget a very very large % of the world's population already lives with no power and very little food (sadly).
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Additionally the destructive power of many of today's projectile weapons is ridiculous. Much of the lager caliber weaponry don't just shoot holes in flesh, it basically disintegrates what it hits. You can probably find some youtube of heavy caliber machine guns or chain guns shooting all sorts of things (watermellons, etc).
Look at WWI where you'd have a million people die just trying to advance 15 feet across a killing field with the other group obliterating anything that stuck its head out.
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Silas' points are why I'm not a huge zombie person. They can be fun (loved 28 Days Later, and who doesn't enjoy L4D?) but they're not particularly enthralling as horror beasties go.
World of Darkness style vamps, now that's where it's at. Superhuman parasitic predators, pulling the puppet strings. Not enough of that around.
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Silas identifies my problem with the book as well; as I commented on another review, while I am not expecting a shaped-charge anti-tank missile or high-velocity subcaliber round to be effective against Zs, after a while of every single weapon built after 1980 being dismissed as useless it feels more like an author filibuster on modern politics and warfare than a coherent story - especially when a huge number of senior military officers seem to have caught the dumb for the first half of the book.
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Silas identifies my problem with the book as well; as I commented on another review, while I am not expecting a shaped-charge anti-tank missile or high-velocity subcaliber round to be effective against Zs, after a while of every single weapon built after 1980 being dismissed as useless it feels more like an author filibuster on modern politics and warfare than a coherent story - especially when a huge number of senior military officers seem to have caught the dumb for the first half of the book.
Yup. But it's more fun if the zombies are menacing!
Not that it would ever be 'real' but you might have more success varying the 'rules' of transmission or combining the Z's with other events that render things more difficult.
If the 'zombie virus' were say, aerosalized and weaponized, shit gets much harder.
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I find it odd that modern armies with thousands of trained soldiers and weaponry are easily overrun but a blind, old Asian man with a stick does fine.
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I find it odd that modern armies with thousands of trained soldiers and weaponry are easily overrun but a blind, old Asian man with a stick does fine.
Never doubt the old blind Asian man.
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Regarding the whole "zombies shouldn't be able to overwhelm armies" thought, I'd argue that it's plausible as described in the book due to two things:
1) The exponential growth function that governs the spread of any zombies means that after a certain point, their numbers would swell to the point that it would challenge the ability of a military to confront them directly. I know in the US, the government is always worried about causing a panic, always wanting to show that it's "in control", and willing to try and sweep festering issues under the rug so that the ones in power won't be ousted in the next election. If covert containment methods were showing signs of success, and you were a delegate to Congress, would you want to stake your political career on mobilizing the country for war against an enemy that shouldn't exist? As such, I can see the initially slow spread not being seen as "a threat", until it reaches a critical point.
2) Even if an army was able to confront them directly, the logistical backbone that feeds, re-arms, maintains, and takes care of that army is extremely susceptible to attacks. Even if they were protected, the consumables they transport and utilize are produced in large part by civilians... who were likely either delicious meatsnacks for the G's or have been turned into one of them. A sustained operation against an omnipresent enemy requires time, energy, and experience, all of which would be lacking.
My zombie fanatic friend has boycotted the film based on the trailers. Not read the book myself, but by his account, they removed a lot of the basic details of how the zombies worked in favour of silly overdone nonsense.
Eh, it wasn't that bad. I'm a pretty hardcore fan of the book, as well as the survival guide, and had the same concerns going in, but they addressed it alright.
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I find it odd that modern armies with thousands of trained soldiers and weaponry are easily overrun but a blind, old Asian man with a stick does fine.
Never doubt the old blind Asian man.
Nevar question Uncle! Dx
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Yes, I was referring to Western world and its civilization falling pretty fast if logistics of food and water supply would fall down.
There seems to be a lot of referencing to the American military and its headcount, most of those that are part of the military are part of the logistics, also a lot of them are abroad, which means in the case of an outbreak they would be very far away from home (logistics wise which makes them even more vulnerable) which would affect severely their capability to protect the civilian population.
With the States, if you have about 250k military personnel and over 360million civilians, the math against the military is pretty bad in any given scenario. Especially since you need the infrastructure of those civilians to keep the whole military complex functional.
So, no, any kind of fast outbreak would be quite impossible to contain with the manpower available.
You can't trust the law enforcement with keeping the peace when the shit hits the fan, also National Guard would have to make their way through the contested roads to their base to get armed and be part of the military force countering the Zs.
I think the idea behind the World War Z is that the outbreak is phenomenally fast and there is no real time to react to it before panic sets in.
Also there is a certain problem with the new age of information technology.
Nobody listens to radio anymore, there would be a part of the population that would never get the information of the outbreak, nor would they get information about how to behave and whatnot.
Very few of the computer savvy folk use the television anymore, same problem.
They would head to work quite oblivious, Shaun of the Dead style, and wind up as Z meat.
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I actually go even further, and have trouble seeing a zombie outbreak really getting a foothold in the U.S. at all. Given the amount of guns per capita, and given the rather over-eager attitude many Americans have towards using them, I suspect that being a zombie in any particular area of the United States would be a rather dangerous occupation.
That said, I love zombie stuffs, and will watch this movie.
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I actually go even further, and have trouble seeing a zombie outbreak really getting a foothold in the U.S. at all. Given the amount of guns per capita, and given the rather over-eager attitude many Americans have towards using them, I suspect that being a zombie in any particular area of the United States would be a rather dangerous occupation.
Olbig. XKCD: http://xkcd.com/734/ (http://xkcd.com/734/)
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I actually go even further, and have trouble seeing a zombie outbreak really getting a foothold in the U.S. at all. Given the amount of guns per capita, and given the rather over-eager attitude many Americans have towards using them, I suspect that being a zombie in any particular area of the United States would be a rather dangerous occupation.
Olbig. XKCD: http://xkcd.com/734/ (http://xkcd.com/734/)
Pretty much.
Granted, I was raised in a...less urban area, shall we say, and I have noted that many Americans seem a bit "soft", if I might be so bold. When you've butchered animals for the night's BBQ, and attacked (with axe, gun, and etc) various wild animals attempting to prey on your livestock, killing a zombie is, maybe, somewhat less of a hurdle.
But then, I remember that quite a few urban dwellers have no problem killing each other all the time. So, you know...
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I've seen a suburban housewife grab another woman's head and slam it into concrete pillar so she could some freaking doll for a Christmas present. (There was a crowd of moms attempting to get said dolls.)
I think urban dwellers are soft but that's never kept them from being vicious.
I expect that if a zombie outbreak ever happens, the real problem won't be the zombies but the other humans grabbing guns and going into crazy survivalist mode.
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So the law and the military would be fighting looters and local warlords on top of the Zs.
Sounds even better.
Also the fact that you have an automatic whatever, does not mean that you can consistently headshot a horde of Zs with it. What about when you have to reload, that is when they are going to get you.
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Just go full incendiary and thermobaric on them.