Giant Freakin Robot

World War Z is one of the most anticipated — and most dreaded — movies of the summer. The long-in-the-works adaptation has seen its fair share of ups and downs with production delays, re-writes, and re-shoots, but it appears director Marc Forster and producer Brad Pitt might have salvaged World War Z from being a complete fiasco. Now that we’re about a month away from the film’s release, Paramount Pictures has continued their marketing campaign for the zombie film with an important public service announcement.

The World War Z PSA is called “The Crisis Zero” and features Michael Kim, former director of the Global Health Agency. While the PSA is clever and in keeping with the idea of a pandemic outbreak, if the world really was being consumed by fast-moving zombies, when would anyone have the time to make, or pay attention to, a public service announcement?

One of Star Trek Into Darkness‘ writers, Damon Lindelof is one of the hottest screenwriters in Hollywood at the moment. Along with Into Darkness, Lindelof was the co-showrunner on the TV series Lost, the co-writer of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, and the co-writer of the upcoming zombie war movie World War Z, starring Brad Pitt.

Lindelof was profiled in the recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, where the 40-year-old writer talked about World War Z and J.J. Abrams‘ forthcoming Star Wars: Episode VII. During World War Z ’s production issues last year, the film’s producer and star Brad Pitt called Lindelof to do a pass on the script’s final act. Pitt was a big fan of Lindelof’s work on Prometheus and thought the screenwriter could work wonders with World War Z. Lindelof says:

‘The idea of a large-scale, epic, $150 million zombie movie starring Brad Pitt sounds pretty good to me,’ he says. ‘Because I haven’t seen that before. I haven’t seen the go-for-broke, insane zombie movie. One of the things that Brad said was, there are so many tropes we’ve come to expect in zombie films, and he wanted to do something different. And the only way to do it different was to

Many of us are curious to see the end result of the chaotic production that has been Marc Forster’s World War Z. The zombie action flick has traveled a long and bumpy road on the way to its June 21st release date. And no one seems more curious to see what World War Z the movie looks like than Max Brooks, who wrote the book the film is based on.

Talking with an interviewer from Mansfield University, Brooks says that the movie “looks like World War Z in name only,” and that the title is pretty much all that two properties have in common. Because of his rather limited involvement, Brooks is unable to shed any light on the actual film—he hasn’t seen it yet either—but this video serves as an in interesting look at the process of adaptation in Hollywood.

Marc Forster’s zombie drama World War Z has traveled a long, bumpy road, and it won’t even hit theaters until June 21. Multiple writers were brought in to fix what was reportedly a disastrous third act, and after wrapping up principal photography, Paramount ordered extensive reshoots. Damon Lindelof (Prometheus) was one of these writers, and he recently opened up about it in an interview.

World War Z is based on the best-selling novel by Max Brooks. If you’ve read the book, you know it doesn’t lend itself to an easy adaptation. While there is an overall thematic arc, there are no continuous characters, and no narrative through line. It reads like a series of short stories. That’s a problem when making the transition from page to screen.

Talking to Vanity Fair, Lindelof says star and producer Brad Pitt told him, “When we started working on the script, a lot of that stuff had to fall away for the story to come together. We started shooting the thing before we locked down how it was going to end up, and it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to.”

After watching a rough cut of the film, Lindelof says the conclusion was “abrupt and incoherent,” and that it was “missing a large chunk of footage.” Again, these things do not bode well for a major motion picture.