Paramount have released the first official synopsis for the upcoming zombie horror film, World War Z, to be led by Brad Pitt, and it shows that the film will be told from the opposite side of the zombie epidemic to Max Brooks’ original novel, Collider report.
In an interesting alteration, rather than taking place after the Zombie War and interviewing the survivors, the film will instead see Pitt trying to stop the outbreak before it is too late.
This first official synopsis reads,
“The story revolves around United Nations employee Gerry Lane (Pitt), who traverses the world in a race against time to stop the Zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments and threatening to decimate humanity itself. Enos plays Gerry’s wife Karen Lane; Kertesz is his comrade in arms, Segen.”
As a minor change to the original novel, in which the lead character was called Max Brooks (the name of the author) Pitt will now be named Gerry Lane. You can understand why they’d change the name because the novelty/post-modern touch of having the lead character called Max Brooks is lost if the author Max Brooks isn’t also the writer/director of the film.
The much larger change of switching time-frames from the original novel, however, is not quite as easy to understand. Whether this was a choice made by the studio or by J. Michael Straczynski and Matthew Michael Carnahan, who have adapted the novel for the big screen, isn’t known. A pre-apocalyptic tale necessarily makes the film very much a different take on the novel as to what has been expected until now, given that it was though to be a post-apocalyptic film.
Different, of course, doesn’t always mean bad. Though the interview is an old one, and the pre-/post-apocalyptic change could have been made after the interview was taken, courtesy of Horror-Movies.ca, Brooks spoke nothing but positive things about the script:
“I can’t give it away, but Straczynski found a way to tie it all together. The last draft I read was amazing.”
It could well be that this was talking about a draft of the script more closely based on his original novel, but either way, let’s hope that it’s still an amazing script. I’m a big fan of everything Brad Pitt does, so I think there’s a good chance I’ll be enjoying this film when it comes out next year regardless of how it differs from the source material.
Mireille Enos (TV’s The Killing) and James Badge Dale (TV’s 24) will be starring alongside Pitt, and we recently reported that Bryan Cranston is in talks to have a small but substantial role in the film too. We also got the first set photos from the film earlier this week, currently filming here in the UK, with an eye to be released on 21st December, 2012. We’ve still got a while to wait for it, but even with this unexpected plot change, it should still be an awesome film.
