so who remembers World War Z? the book, I mean. it's a very slow story, told in the form of after-action interviews with dozens of people from all around the globe, about a zombie outbreak that stretched past the scope of "outbreak" and even "pandemic" and stretches into multiple decades between patient zero to final "containment". and even then the zombies aren't really "contained", they are simply a known threat, and dealing with them and the lasting impact they've had on the world is simply the way things are now. there is no single hero that saves everyone, nor even a single country that saves the entire world; it's a story about humanity
remember the movie they made for that book? how some dipshit studio exec decided that their viewers are fucking morons before they are anything else, so it needed to be a big summer blockbuster movie with a bajillion dollar budget and brad pitt and cgi "fast" style zombies and stupid decisions that exist solely to make action sequences happen and the requisite michael-bay-esque fellating of the military so they could play with their toys and a fucking prerequisite pepsi product placement so brad pitt can photogenically chug a can of soda before wandering over to give ol' Uncle Sam the know-how to mop all these zombie varmints up in like three weeks, tops, god bless america what the fuck is a kilometer
and naturally this resulted in a drastically inferior product that happens, by grandest coincidence, to share a few character names and even a title with a much better book; but otherwise the two bear no similarity to each other
but consider for a moment a film version of World War Z that stayed truer to the text, perhaps a sort of documentary/anthology mashup with no summer release, with no obligation to "put the money on the screen" to appeal to more people to sell more tickets, with no need to rush things along lest they lose the audience's attention, because everyone involved in this film knows who they're making it for, and trusts those people to follow along with the story they're telling
that's Iron Lung. it is a good movie, not a "fun" one. it expects you to understand what it's saying, but it trusts that you will. it is a labor of love, simply, but love can be horrifying
