Read the book a few years ago and the movie is a lot more exciting. The book was a bunch of UN reports talking about the zombie outbreak and finding patient zero. Now it is Brad Pitt as a loose cannon forced back into service with the UN and managing to save the world. Loved the cure and the movie did have me on edge. Think I will sleep with a fire ax tonight.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
Sometime in 2011 the total number of film plots with the keyword “zombie” passed the number of film plots with the keyword “cowboy,” according to the Internet Film Data Base. One might argue that the zombie has become the great American archetype of the postmodern era, as the cowboy was the American archetype a century ago. With the release of Brad Pitt’s $200 billion zombie epic, what used to be the stuff of low-budget shockers has entered the American cultural mainstream. Therein lies a lesson.
“The history of the world is the history of humankind’s search for immortality,” I argued in my 2011 book Why Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). Human beings can’t tolerate life without the hope of some existence beyond our brief mortal span of years. Cultures that know they have past their best-used-by-date tend to die for lack of interest. Extreme examples are the neolithic tribes that walk out of the Amazon to encounter modernity, and succumb to alcoholism and other vices in a matter of years. Less extreme examples are the radical Muslims who declare that they love death more than we love life, or the European nations whose fertility rate is so low that their national survival is questionable at the hundred-year horizon. I argued in Civilizationsthat the so-called Arab Spring was a paroxysm of cultural despair, the prelude to societal breakdown with appalling consequences; watching the dreadful events in Egypt and Syria, few today can dismiss this thesis as alarmist.
Dying cultures are the living dead. Half of the world’s 6,000 languages will disappear by the end of this century. They are zombie cultures. But we Americans are gestating a zombie culture inside what used to be a “country with the soul of a church,” as G.K. Chesterton put it. The hedonistic narcissism that took over popular culture during the 1960s produced a spiritual deadening like nothing in American history. That’s why we are so fascinated with zombies. We identify with them.
I have to agree to a certain extent. Went to see World War Z for my birthday last Sunday and it was "alright." It definitely wasn't Brad Pitts best performance. Otherwise it's kinda cliche. I liked the newer Dawn of the Dead and the T.V series Walking Dead more than World War Z, to give a comparison. I want more POST-apocalyptic type movies, like Book of Eli, I Am Legend and Mad Max. Mad Max: Fury Road is coming out next year though, so I'm keeping my hopes up for that. Otherwise, I watch random stuff, hahahaha.
EDIT: Another good couple movies were Escape from NY and Escape from LA... "You've reached the end of the line Pliskin." "Call me Snake."
FredHayek wrote: Read the book a few years ago and the movie is a lot more exciting. The book was a bunch of UN reports talking about the zombie outbreak and finding patient zero. Now it is Brad Pitt as a loose cannon forced back into service with the UN and managing to save the world. Loved the cure and the movie did have me on edge. Think I will sleep with a fire ax tonight.
I read that they made a radical departure from the book and if you'd read the book and loved it, you were not going to like the screen adaptation.
I haven't read the book, but I'm kind of over zombies too. And vampires. I'll stick with my super heroes and Katniss!
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
