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I watched World War Z almost a decade after first watching it originally and it was still pretty bad. I read the novel yesterday and sort of wish it was a limited series.
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Jul 12, 2023 18:29
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Hasturtium posted:I didn’t know what to expect from Blue Beetle, but “Latino teenaged Iron Man, but blue” wasn’t on my bingo card. These movies make me feel tired. That's pretty much the gist of the character. Well that and doing buddy comedy poo poo with Booster Gold.
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Jul 12, 2023 20:09
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I've only ever seen this beetle in the Batman Brave and the Bold cartoon, is the comic similar to this portrayal?
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Jul 12, 2023 20:13
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He was in one or both of the Injustice games. And I think Max Landis got mad at him in that Superman video he made.
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Jul 12, 2023 20:32
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Professor Shark posted:I watched World War Z almost a decade after first watching it originally and it was still pretty bad. I read the novel yesterday and sort of wish it was a limited series. The full-cast audio drama is probably the best version of the story. Also a more stacked cast than the movie. Scorsese does a voice in it!
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Jul 12, 2023 21:15
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Tars Tarkas posted:I've only ever seen this beetle in the Batman Brave and the Bold cartoon, is the comic similar to this portrayal? I want to say once Jaime took on the mantle, yes. Maybe not quite as zanzy as Brave and the Bold (which is a great god drat show) but certainly a bit more lighthearted. And like I said, him and Booster Gold doing buddy comedy shenanigans.
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Jul 12, 2023 23:24
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https://twitter.com/TheOneAzrai/status/1679129477924761603
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Jul 13, 2023 00:15
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Professor Shark posted:I watched World War Z almost a decade after first watching it originally and it was still pretty bad. I read the novel yesterday and sort of wish it was a limited series. The book was pretty loving bad too. The battle of Yonkers is still one of the stupidest things I've read and I spent a chunk of my youth reading Warhammer 40k novels.
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Jul 13, 2023 00:18
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Snowman_McK posted:The book was pretty loving bad too. The battle of Yonkers is still one of the stupidest things I've read and I spent a chunk of my youth reading Warhammer 40k novels. On the other hand, you're wrong. I don't know if it's a reading comprehension thing, but it's explained pretty clearly as a total fuckup from top to bottom, and the reasoning that allowed it to occur. The fact it was so stupid is the most believable thing about it.
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Jul 13, 2023 00:31
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Beachcomber posted:On the other hand, you're wrong. I don't know if it's a reading comprehension thing, but it's explained pretty clearly as a total fuckup from top to bottom, and the reasoning that allowed it to occur. The fact it was so stupid is the most believable thing about it. It's not a reading comprehension thing (gently caress you) it's just not a very good scene. Zombies always require an enormous amount of contrivance to be a threat and the battle of yonkers features a massive, massive, massive amount of contrivance. There's 'the military makes non ideal decisions under pressure' and there's 'the military makes the worst possible decision at every single point.' It also brings to the fore that Brooks never quite decided if the zombies were magic or not. Artillery being ineffective against them for instance, because it didn't score direct headshots or couldn't achieve the 'blood balloon' effect. The blast and shockwave of artillery liquifies muscle and pulps bone, to say nothing of what it does to the brain itself. They can't 'drag themselves forward' if they no longer have limbs or bones attached to each other. Also, something that has to drag itself forward on its arms is a slower, less effective enemy than something with legs. "soft infantry in the open" is something that artillery has been extremely effective against for several hundred years. Unless, they're magic and thus completely pulping the bodies isn't something that kills them Also, 'literally thousands of infantry with scoped rifles' is something a zombie army couldn't get past. Back in WW1, it was estimated that a group of riflemen attacking another group of entrenched riflemen would need a twelve to one advantage. That's infantry, who can run forward, take cover, occasionally fire back. Not a shambling, slow moving horde of soft targets. Rifle rounds kill tissue they pass through (there's some absolutely horrifying stories from the various mass shootings in the US about what 5.56 does to tissue) and, so, even non headshots are killing muscle, destroying nerve connections, breaking bones. Unless, of course, the zombies are magic. It's a blend of 'here's some actual research I did on how the military might react' mixed with arbitrarily deciding why that wouldn't work. The idea of the military reacting exclusively with Cold War era tactics ten years into the war on terror is it's own problem. Essentially, there's a reason why zombie movies either skip the part where the zombies overcome the military or end with the military showing up and restoring order. Because as soon as you try to explain why 'hordes of soft targets overcome machine guns' you end up with something dumber than galactic wars being settled by sword fights.
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Jul 13, 2023 01:02
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Pope Corky the IX posted:He was in one or both of the Injustice games. And I think Max Landis got mad at him in that Superman video he made. Injustice Jaime is just too cute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW0TaJUNjes
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Jul 13, 2023 01:17
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I bought WWZ about 16 years ago when it was all the rage on nerd forums. Read a chapter or two and never finished it. The movie was a real disappointment. Turns out “Zombie movie with a huge budget” maybe isn’t as great an idea as I thought it might be when I was younger.
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Jul 13, 2023 01:45
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Snowman_McK posted:It's not a reading comprehension thing (gently caress you) it's just not a very good scene. Zombies always require an enormous amount of contrivance to be a threat and the battle of yonkers features a massive, massive, massive amount of contrivance. There's 'the military makes non ideal decisions under pressure' and there's 'the military makes the worst possible decision at every single point.' no, i’m pretty sure zombies would beat the army
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Jul 13, 2023 01:45
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Also Brooks’s optimistic view of how Israel would behave in a worldwide crisis looks dumber every time the Israel government does pretty much anything.
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Jul 13, 2023 01:56
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Casimir Radon posted:Also Brooks’s optimistic view of how Israel would behave in a worldwide crisis looks dumber every time the Israel government does pretty much anything. You have to understand that zombies are often metaphors for other kinds of people in these kinds of stories. Max is simply thinking of another group he thinks of as a disease-carrying horde and letting his imagination fill in the details.
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Jul 13, 2023 02:30
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Snowman_McK posted:
There were 3-4 million zombies, is the thing, which is what I notice people miss. I should have been more expansive in my original reply, but I didn't want to make up the numbers. Soldiers are trained to shoot for center mass, and there are studies that show some soldiers never even successfully pull the trigger because....combat isn't easy? Expecting a single soldier to take down even 20 human-shaped things is asking a hell of a lot. The numbers in the book would require 300-400.
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Jul 13, 2023 02:40
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I AM GRANDO posted:You have to understand that zombies are often metaphors for other kinds of people in these kinds of stories. Max is simply thinking of another group he thinks of as a disease-carrying horde and letting his imagination fill in the details. Israel is garbage, but the book is explicit about them letting Muslims in and then Israeli zealots would be the ones doing terrorisms.
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Jul 13, 2023 02:43
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Max Brooks later wrote a comic about two vampires protecting Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country, from zombies. But I haven't read enough about it to know how his politics played out in the story.
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Jul 13, 2023 02:58
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Beachcomber posted:There were 3-4 million zombies, is the thing, which is what I notice people miss. I should have been more expansive in my original reply, but I didn't want to make up the numbers. And they only managed to kill a few tens of thousands of zombies, according to the book, which is insane. Which is why it's always a good idea to keep numbers vague. The US army also only deploying a few thousand people against a 4 million horde is also absurd, given the insane size of the US military. Even if they lost all several thousand, that is about two percent of the US army alone. A scenario where they made more non stupid decisions but the sheer weight of numbers is what turned it would have worked better. Killing half of a 4 million strong horde still leaves you with two million. But a rule of writing is that if you make one side smart, you have to make the other side smarter. And so instead he just wrote the military as the dumbest thing imaginable and also decided weapons that absolutely pulp human bodies suddenly don't do that. Also, hitting centre mass still kills (like, straight up destroys) tissue in the posterior chain, severs the spine and so on. So, now a thing that was slow is even slower and is nothing but a barrier for those behind it. Unless of course the zombies are magic and can reconnect nerve endings that have been severed. Zombie movies can be fun but trying to make them a credible threat always falls apart really loving fast. Snowman_McK fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Jul 13, 2023 |
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Jul 13, 2023 03:01
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Given that the US has been known to carpet bomb people, being overrun with zombies just doesn't make sense. Funny thing is in Zack Snyder's Army of The Dead, the military carpet bombing zombies is part of the story.
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Jul 13, 2023 03:03
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The MSJ posted:Given that the US has been known to carpet bomb people, being overrun with zombies just doesn't make sense. Yeah, the air force is always conspicuously absent in zombie movies.
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Jul 13, 2023 03:04
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I think just about every Resident Evil game ends with a nuke or a giant bomb exploding everything in one fashion.
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Jul 13, 2023 03:07
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Beachcomber posted:There were 3-4 million zombies, is the thing, which is what I notice people miss. I should have been more expansive in my original reply, but I didn't want to make up the numbers. A M30A1 with Alternate Warhead, fired from the M142 HIMARS and M270 MLRS multiple launched rocket systems, are designed for soft targets such as light armored vehicles and infantry, putting as many as 180,000 tungsten darts into a blast radius of over 2 and half football fields and a dispersion of around 1 high-velocity dart for every square meter. A full salvo of six can disperse over a million tungsten darts over an artillery grid coordinate square (1km by 1km), earning it the nickname of "grid square remover". The average artillery brigade has 9 such launchers and they can reload within 9 minutes. Entirely irrelevant factoid to the discussion at hand.
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Jul 13, 2023 03:14
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The background of the book involves the US being involved in conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan for an additional decade or so, with people being decreasingly willing to enable the military, leading to fatigue and stuff.Young Freud posted:A M30A1 with Alternate Warhead, fired from the M142 HIMARS and M270 MLRS multiple launched rocket systems, are designed for soft targets such as light armored vehicles and infantry, putting as many as 180,000 tungsten darts into a blast radius of over 2 and half football fields and a dispersion of around 1 high-velocity dart for every square meter. A full salvo of six can disperse over a million tungsten darts over an artillery grid coordinate square (1km by 1km), earning it the nickname of "grid square remover". The average artillery brigade has 9 such launchers and they can reload within 9 minutes. Holy poo poo.
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Jul 13, 2023 03:35
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Isn’t this the book that celebrates P.W. Botha and suggests that apartheid-era practices are best against zombie hordes?
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Jul 13, 2023 03:44
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Beachcomber posted:Holy poo poo. Yeah. Keep in mind that everything a modern military uses is used with the anticipation that what they're shooting at is protecting themselves, by dispersing, hiding, taking cover, entrenching...whatever. Zombies aren't doing anything like that. In fact, the book specifies that they're driven on some level to group up. Against a zombie horde, they're not really 'appropriate' but more in the sense of being staggering overkill rather than not good enough at killing. The M109 Paladin (a self propelled artillery gun) can fire 4 rounds a minute, for instance at a maximum effective range of 22 km. It can do that because it needs to blanket entire areas with shells because the people in those areas have done things to make themselves harder to hit. Zombies have not done that. It is heavily armoured and able to move itself around because it is anticipated that quick moving things like helicopters or tanks might be looking for it. Zombies cannot do that. Again, I know why Brooks did it, but he did it in a way that snapped me hard out of the story. Pope Corky the IX posted:Isn’t this the book that celebrates P.W. Botha and suggests that apartheid-era practices are best against zombie hordes? I'm pretty sure there's also a Weeaboo who kills heaps of zombies with a katana.
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Jul 13, 2023 03:45
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He's Japanese so more otaku than weeaboo, buy a rose by any other name is just as cringe.
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Jul 13, 2023 03:48
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Beachcomber posted:Israel is garbage, but the book is explicit about them letting Muslims in and then Israeli zealots would be the ones doing terrorisms. I apologize to Max Brooks for my cheap shot. Presenting Israel as a cool and hyper-competent operator usually betrays a certain set of beliefs held by the author, but not always.
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Jul 13, 2023 03:54
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The only story from it I read was the one focusing on the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station for the duration of the war. I remember it being pretty good, but it's been a while.
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Jul 13, 2023 03:59
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Pope Corky the IX posted:Isn’t this the book that celebrates P.W. Botha and suggests that apartheid-era practices are best against zombie hordes? I don't know who the real guy is, but they deliberately seek out the cold bloodedest evil guy, say how evil he is, but ask his solution to their lose-lose scenario, say how hosed up it is and use it anyway, and have that guy have a mental break because he can't live with how garbage a person he is. The 'solution' was encouraging small groups to shelter in place instead of rescuing them so that the zombies would hang around them instead of continuing on to where the majority of the population was. So dropping off weapons and food instead of pulling them out on helicopters.
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Jul 13, 2023 04:04
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Everyone knows the US government would deny the zombies exist even after the president's brains get eaten on live tv
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Jul 13, 2023 04:38
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Beachcomber posted:Soldiers are trained to shoot for center mass, and there are studies that show some soldiers never even successfully pull the trigger because....combat isn't easy? To my recollection, those studies count people who, for example, manned artillery among those who never pulled the trigger. Which may be technically accurate, but creates a false impression of soldiers being unwilling to fire rather than being assigned to roles in which there was no need for them to. Extensive studies were done in Vietnam and over 90% of soldiers in a position to fire their weapon at an enemy did so.
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Jul 13, 2023 05:18
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Beachcomber posted:Holy poo poo. People don't really realize how ridiculous powerful military ordinance actually is, especially in high-density urban environments. If a military aircraft accidentally armed and dropped a single Mk 82 500 lbs iron bomb on a 8-lane freeway during rush hour, it's 30m x 80m ellipsoid blast area would about severely damage and destroy 120 automobiles and probably killing and injuring up to 200 people. Anyone standing within 250 meters of ground zero have a 10% of getting hit and being incapacitated (read: killed or so severely wounded they require immediate medical attention) by fragments. And that's just a standard bomb, nothing specifically designed for anti-personnel. And a single one: since we've had a rogue A-10 pilot before who flew with live bombs, an A-10 with 30 of these things would potentially destroy 1500-3000 vehicles in a mini-"Highway of Death", with who knows how many casualties. A rogue A-10 bombing a traffic-jammed highway would likely beat out 9/11 in terms of lives loss. That's how much firepower is in one of these things. Snowman_McK posted:Yeah. Keep in mind that everything a modern military uses is used with the anticipation that what they're shooting at is protecting themselves, by dispersing, hiding, taking cover, entrenching...whatever. Zombies aren't doing anything like that. In fact, the book specifies that they're driven on some level to group up. Against a zombie horde, they're not really 'appropriate' but more in the sense of being staggering overkill rather than not good enough at killing. The M109 Paladin (a self propelled artillery gun) can fire 4 rounds a minute, for instance at a maximum effective range of 22 km. It can do that because it needs to blanket entire areas with shells because the people in those areas have done things to make themselves harder to hit. Zombies have not done that. It is heavily armoured and able to move itself around because it is anticipated that quick moving things like helicopters or tanks might be looking for it. Zombies cannot do that. Even something like rows and rows and concertina wire and razor wire would be detrimental, since the wire is usually considered to stop infantry momentarily, enough to hit them with small arms, grenades, or squad heavy weapons as the opfor tries to dismantle or blow up the wire. Zombies don't do that, so they would not only get cut to shreds blindly charging or crawling into them, they'd also get tangled up and get crushed underfoot by the momentum of their fellow zombies. TBF, zombies crowds crushing less-than-mobile zombies is rarely considered, but it happens so often with panicked crowds that it's hard to ignore. Someone blows off the legs of the front row of a zombie with an M2 .50 cal, grenades, or land mines, and the zombies behind them continue walking over them until they're paste.
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Jul 13, 2023 05:29
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The MSJ posted:Given that the US has been known to carpet bomb people, being overrun with zombies just doesn't make sense. That opening montage is so good. I still laugh thinking about the paratroopers.
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Jul 13, 2023 05:49
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poo poo, now I'm watching TekWar. 4 episodes down. Its... actually not nearly as bad as I recalled. Dumb as hell and chock full cliches, naturally, but it does the job. It's nowhere hear Max Headroom in quality, and not up there with Total Recall 2070 or Batman Beyond in terms of ambition, writing, or production quality, but it's very watchable cyberpunk fantasy nonsense if you want ridiculous trash. It's just too bad that it's got no "punk" in it, just uses the setting to make more procedural copaganda. feedmyleg fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Jul 13, 2023 |
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Jul 13, 2023 06:15
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I AM GRANDO posted:I apologize to Max Brooks for my cheap shot. Presenting Israel as a cool and hyper-competent operator usually betrays a certain set of beliefs held by the author, but not always. Considering Max Brooks is literally the son of Mel Brooks iirc... But more that for a while there def was a whole meme of Israel being super cool deadly OPERATORS especially at the height of the War On Terror which Israel itself has done a pretty good job of running into the ground among anyone not funding or funded by AIPAC. Zombie fiction just tends to attract the worst kind of nerd who will go on and on about nuh uh zombies would totally roll over all but the best tactical operators and so on.
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Jul 13, 2023 06:31
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WWZ was an entertaining trash book, but the adaptation left out any of them interesting ideas and was so generic it's hard to see why they bought the rights, it could have just been "Brad Pitt zombie movie" and probably sold the same - just like I, Robot was just "Will Smith robot movie"
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Jul 13, 2023 09:03
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it really was proof that Zombies are too big to fail
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Jul 13, 2023 09:37
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The zombies do get bombed, which is demoralising because they just shamble of the cloud of dust afterwards. Then the solution eventually turns out to be cool soldiers with cooler guns shooting zombies 24/7 until the absurdly gigantic crowd is culled Also everyone is suicidally depressed to live in the post-post-apocalypse, but that little issue is solved by filming new movies
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Jul 13, 2023 11:31
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i mean like as a marketing product
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Jul 13, 2023 11:35
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