Witchy Woman

The book was written documentary style as a series of oral interviews of survivors a decade after the end of the war.  The result is a rich tapestry of people from all over the world, all different lifestyles, and different stories to tell.  Ultimately, this presents a critique on the flaws of our society and government today, with a vision of how things could be, even after apocalyptic conditions.  For example, conflict in the Middle East is resolved in light of the greater threat, the US forgoes its imperialism, and international bureaucracy and politics are virtually non-existent.

The movie, on the other hand, is reduced to the narrative of one person: Gerry Lane, a former UN investigator.  The horrors and experiences of an entire world are condensed in the body of a white, heterosexual, cis male.  We go from having vivid snapshots of individuals from around the world with names like General Raj-Singh, Dr. Kwang Jinshu, Nury Televaldi, Fernando Oliveira, Saladin Kadar, and Father Sergei Ryzhkov to Thierry Umutoni, Jurgen Warmbrunn (played by a white actor), Segen, and Tommy as the few named characters who are not white.

In the movie, the "least-white" area that our hero visits is South Korea.  (Don't even get me started on how the origin of outbreak was moved from China to Russia for fear of offending someone).  The other stops on his world tour?  Philadelphia, New York, Jerusalem, Cardiff, and Nova Scotia.  So not only are the stories of others written out of the plot, but evidently so is the entire rest of the non-white, non-US allied world.  Kind of hard to call it World War Z, eh?

What it really boils down to is that they gutted a wonderful social commentary in order to create a cookie-cutter action film wank-fest for dude-bros.  The trailers make it rather hard to see the zombies around the close-ups of Brad Pitt.  It's sad that they took zombie culture, really a criticism of society itself, in order to sterilize, package, and market it for what Hollywood thought would "best" and least offensive.  It's the undead eating the living.  It's meant to be offensive.