Welcome to your new career, Marc Forster. Once you were the director of middling Oscar bait, but as of the release of Quantum of Solace, you’re a mainstream filmmaker.
First Forster attached himself to the dubiously titled Die Bad*, an actiony crime film, and now he’s set to direct the adaptation of Max Brooks’ World War Z, the sweeping novel about humanity fighting off a zombie plague.
I don’t know if Forster has read the book, though. “The genre always fascinated me, and when they pitched it to me, it reminded me of the paranoid conspiracy films of the ’70s like ‘All the President’s Men,'” he tells the trades. All the President’s Men? I don’t even know where the comparison is being drawn on that one, to be honest, except that World War Z is presented as an oral history compiled by a historian and journalists are sort of like historians? Was Richard Nixon actually a flesh eating ghoul (I can see it)?
There’s already a script out there, written by J Michael Straczynski, the terrible science fiction guy and the screenwriter of the atrocious Changeling. Between you and me I don’t see the point of making this film unless you make it like a talking heads documentary, and in that case I double can’t see the point of making it, since that’s just not a cinematic conceit.
Okay, I’m being too nitpicky on that point. That said, there’s a lot of room for improvement in Brooks’ book, which is written like he had no idea that people should have unique voices. There are lots of great concepts in the book, but as a whole it failed to inspire me. That said, I’m going to get my nerd on in a big way and say that World War Z would make a kick ass semi-anthology miniseries on HBO.
* sounds like either the Turkish version of Die Hard or a movie about rigged voting machines.