Continuing with the feeling of Halloween, what could represent Halloween better than zombies?
If you’ve see the movie, forget the movie. It has almost no
similarity to the book aside from the locations and not even then does it
follow book. Now if they’d called the movie something else it would have been
hailed as brilliant but fans of the book who saw it were outraged and made that
known with good reason. Instead of
concentrating on individual survival, the novel concentrates on governments and
groups as a whole. The solution to the
plague wasn’t even similar. The main character didn’t mention a family or work
with Navy. The American government was barely involved since most of the East
Coast was lost fairly early. The book didn’t even technically take place during
the apocalypse.
The book starts with an introduction from the “author” who
is a reporter. This intro explains the whole purpose was to document the years
of the zombie war so that the history wasn’t lost or worse repeated. The book
is a series of a cross between personal interviews and military reports about
the plague years. It starts with the idea of this book and follows current
government figures and survivors their survival stories back to Patient Zero.
Once we figure out how the plague starts, there’s a small afterward from
various interviewees that hint at what various governments are preparing next.
I don’t know how Max Brooks managed to write such a moving
story about zombies but the realism of this book blows the stereotypical zombie
movie out of the water. It’s easily imaginable that people would cope with a
zombie invasion the same way the people in the book did. I can see something
like the Reddecker plan being put into action and the consequences to the
people involved would likely be the same. People talk about the “politics”
being left out of the movie, but it’s not what I would typically think of as
politics. There’s no voting or long winded speech making to groups of people.
The political aspect is more the cause and effects of the government actions.
All of the characters make decisions they regret and lose people to the virus. If
you are a fan of zombies but you want a more realistic approach to the
storytelling, this is nice change of pace from the action-packed, gore fest
zombie movies tend to be.
