The Walking Zed

I wish I could say I’ve been exceptionally busy since last Sunday, and that’s why I haven’t written here much since then, except to post the occasional song and song lyric. But it’s really more that one day has been just like the last, and there hasn’t been a whole lot to write about. Lots of things happening at work, lots of projects underway, but nothing that necessarily bears mention.

Yesterday, I finished reading World War Z, which was surprisingly entertaining. Today, I went to see the movie version, which, maybe unsurprisingly, was not.

The movie has its moments, but far too few of them, and I was bored more than anything else by the end. (“More like World War Zzzzzzzzz,” I joked on Twitter, until some madwoman suggested it should be pronounced “Zed.” I know, right?) The book works a lot better than it ought to, given that there are no central characters or even, really, what you would call a plot. Brooks is great at introducing a lot of neat ideas, and surprisingly adept at wringing tension out of stories that we know, right up front, are going to end at least reasonably well. (It’s an oral history told by the survivors of the zombie war, after all.) He’s not quite as skilled at making the authors of each of those stories sound like a different person, but it’s a clever concept overall and engaging enough that I could forgive the book its occasional faults.

I’m less forgiving of the movie, which bears only a passing resemblance to the book. Not that I think the book is especially cinematic, or that I can’t understand all the changes that they made to it. It’s just that those changes don’t add up to an exciting summer spectacle, or a good time at the movies. There are hundreds, if not thousands of extras on screen — super-fast zombie swarms, one of many deviations from the text — but it’s remarkably bloodless for a zombie movie, with only a few genuine scares. (That’s what you get with a PG-13 rating, I guess.) It’s not an awful film, and I don’t think it quite unseats Survival of the Dead from its place in my heart as most disappointing zombie movie. But I honestly think I would have been better off going with my first impulse and seeing Fast & Furious 6.

Yes, that was my first impulse. What? Don’t judge me.

Last night, I watched another somewhat disappointing movie, The Awakening. As the AV Club review says, “the film does include a few effective chills, thanks to its elegantly creepy setting—an old manor house turned boarding school—and its use of period paranormal-detection equipment.” It takes a real turn near the end, however — one that’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the entire movie — and one that I’m not at all convinced really works. As the AV Club also points out, “the unraveling is a letdown, not just because it diffuses the frightening mystery, but because it treads on the wistful, doomed sense of longing the film built up.”

Today I also had my weekly writing group, where a set of pictures and words pulled from a magazine prompted this for some reason:

In theory, he was already dead. He could stay inside the capsule for another year, maybe longer if he managed to stretch what was left of the supplies, or he could swing open the hatch and let what would inevitably happen, happen now. There would be no rescue, even if Tabitha reconsidered, and he knew there was little chance of that. And even if she did, even if right this minute she was telling the others where to find him, and they were plotting a course, it would be the better part of a decade before they reached him, at best. He had only two options: face death now, the brutal cold of the planet’s surface, hypothermia or asphyxiation — he was not entirely sure which would claim him first; or delay the end, for a little while, push it off with few short months of solitude and exile and nothing but his own thoughts and corps rations for company. There was only one logical choice. And yet, it was logic that had found him in this place to begin with. He would be an even bigger fool not to realize that. There was only one choice, but that did not mean he had to make that choice today.

He was lucky the rest of the crew had died on impact or in the explosion before. It would save him from the tiresome chore of having to kill them.

There was still the on-board AI to contend with, only a vestige of what had been destroyed in the main ship, more child’s toy than super-computer, but it could still pose a threat if it was running the code that Tabitha had written into it. He had heard nothing from the AI since crashing; the capsule’s internal diagnostics suggested it was inactive, likely inoperable if not destroyed, but he did not know how far to trust that. The diagnostics had already been fooled once by his wife’s clever sabotage.

He didn’t think she had meant to kill McKenzie or Parish, who had escaped in the capsule with him, or any of the ship’s modest crew. The AI had disabled the fire suppression system during a routine refueling, then allowed a short-circuit in one of the hydroponic bays. If the bay had been empty at the time, if they had been using the refueling stop to also restock their supplies, they might have remained at the station long enough for everyone aboard to escape. Instead, he had…

It feels rushed near the end, not least of all because it literally trails off, and I don’t really have a handle on the character (much less the others he mentions). But what can you expect from forty minutes in a crowded Panera Bread?

Oh, and I started reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I’m about a third of the way into the novel and really quite enjoying it so far.

Until next Sunday, then?