I have been coming to grudgingly see the point behind J. Michael Straczysnki’s conspiracy thriller script for World War Z. While my ideal adaptation of that book would be a mockumentary (which would be so dramatically inert that financing it would make as much sense as giving 150 million dollars directly to a Farscape fanatics condom fund), if you’re going to try to turn Max Brooks’ faux oral history into some kind of a movie you have to find a throughline of some sort. And that throughline will be the writing of the book itself, and the film will follow a UN researcher as he does his interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Zombie War.
Now Straczysnki is psyched that Marc Forster is on his film, since Quantum of Solace is fucking killing at the global box office, and JM has allowed himself to gush a little bit about the scope of his film:
“Most zombie movies to this point have been small, focusing on a few
people in a house. And this has got real scare. You’re in India with
hundreds of boats trying to get out of there with a tidal wave of
zombies. The scale of what we’re doing here is phenomenal.”
Continues the master of Babylon 5: “It has that international feel to it, and because it goes backward and
forward in time, we can cherry-pick our favorite moments in the book,”
continued Straczynski. “Some of it is crazy in scale. It’s huge. It’s
as political as the book was. And it ends with that book being
completed.”
He compares his script to the Bourne films, which is super weird, but whatever gets him funding, I guess.
Look for the film to start shooting sometime next year. Read more at MTV.