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Richard Brunton, over at Filmstalker, has responded to J. Michael Straczynski’s recent comments on the upcoming World War Z adaptation. And he’s worried.

When I heard that director of the recent Bond snooze-fest Quantum of Solace Marc Forester was on board, I too was worried. I found QoS to be really dull and uninteresting, so I was convinced he was going to ruin World War Z.

But Straczynski’s recent comments actually give me hope. The book is, essentially, unfilmable in its written form. It follows a UN investigator who’s trying to document a world wide zombie outbreak. It’s made up of anecdotes that he’s captured from survivors, each of which has a different perspective of the catastrophe to the other. As a result, any cinematic retelling of the book should, if done right, be unlike any zombie movie ever made. For a start, the epidemic is over, contained. It’s not a threat any more. So the emphasis needs to not be on the threat that the zombies pose, but the effect that they’ve had on the world around us.

In order to do this, the film’s going to have to move around a lot, and is going to have to build up a picture of what went on. Straczynski’s comparison to Bourne doesn’t worry me - I don’t think he’s suggesting that the film is an action/spy thriller, I think he’s saying it’ll move around the world, and will combine thoughtful, less action focused moments, interspersed with some great set pieces. Which is exactly how the book needs to be filmed.

So I’m hoping this is heading in the right direction. The writer definitely has a grip on it, and by the sounds of it the director is in tune too. I’m not going to write Forester off simply because QoS sucked - I’m hoping that his interpretation of Bond doesn’t align with what I want from the character, and that the result was just one of those things. WWZ is a different film entirely, so you can’t equate the failure to do Bond right with failure here.

The key thing here is going to be the studio - the money men. The script needs an awful lot of backing and support, and those set pieces need to be pretty bloody special to punctuate the more talkative elements. If it’s done right, if everything falls into place and Straczynski’s (and more importantly Max Brooks’) vision is conveyed effectively onto the screen, it could be amazing.

Will the studio commit enough money and resources to do this right? Only time will tell. Keep your fingers crossed.