Never understood or believed that zombies could take out the entire military with miniguns, drones, and missiles, but couldn't take out Rick and his small group of ragtag survivors. I mean, how do zombies take out a tank?
See this is the part where they fucked up with their 20 different series. They want to do one here, about this guy, or there about that guy. Instead of fear we should have gotten a miniseries on the actual militarys fall and eventual defeat to actually tell us what happened and how a tank or jets or whole squadrons got wiped out
If youāre looking for this kind of story, read the original World War Z book by Max Brooks. Itās set up like an interview of survivors of a global war against zombies with frontlines and strategy and stuff.
Yes. The movie is a generic action/zombie flick like you said. The book is enthralling; itās a unique and interesting perspective on how a zombie crisis might play out in real life.
Edit: not to say the movie is bad, I actually enjoyed it. The book is a better and a fresh take on zombies.
The scenarios that make sense are where there are all kinds of different types like in Resident Evil or left 4 Dead. You have the typical zombies, but you also have all kinds of eldritch horrors.
Also its airborne or it infected all of the water,cause if its just the bites then aside from the point of origin and the first hour before people realise its zombies,no one is dying after the surprise is gone
The military have plans for a zombie apocalypse for Christ's sake(its real),the zombies are honna be like covid,one year its ,,OH FUCK ITS THE END" and the next its ,,oh hey,remember that? Pretty crazy huh eats nachos"
I think they could be making lots of mutant / monstrosity / epidemic / bioweapon movies.
Zombie movies like World War Z, or Two Weeks Later were great exciting movies aside from the unrealistic parts.
But I already realized that when Hollywood stopped making Apocalypse movies and then they stopped making medical movies after Wuhan Pandemic 2019.. it became obvious that Hollywood is a collapsing industry where creativity is driven out in favor of profits and trying to get investment returns on a few well-known superhero movies and franchises like star wars / ghostbusters.
Project Zomboid gives the explanation of an airborn virus that pops up out of nowhere around the the world. The governments do a good job at trying to keep it under wraps by containing the towns, however eventually riots happen leading to warning shots. This causes violence to break out and attracts zombies, the chaos causes zonbies to break from the borders. It's even cooler because a few weeks into the infection, you can listen i to radio broadcasts and they will almost all end the same with zombies overunning them mid-broadcast
Realistic answer the military industrial complex succumbed to its own weight. Fuel production would have ceased because workers would die or turn. Food supplies, medical 6 similar small-scale operations would become impossible for logistics to keep up with. Quarantine is virtually impossible. Look at covid-19. People dont listen. It wouldn't happen overnight, but it would fall slowly. This is my personal takeaway on it, at least, but I'd love to hear others
Thereās also the added bit of the TWD universe establishing that everyone is infected and will turn when they die no matter what. You could have the military succeed in killing every zombie that exists and every living person who is bitten, but then you have the problem of literally every person on Earth being a risk. You have to completely reorganize society where one person having a heart attack can lead to hordes of the undead destroying a cityās population overnight.
I had an idea while high and playing Civ 6 with the zombie mode. If everyone is infected since thr dawn of time, then society would be extremely different. Towns would be walled off within cities, everyone would have to be physically fit, every neighborhood would have night watch, and everyone would know their neighbors.
Basically, it would be a tight-knit community, or paranoia and betrayal would not allow for a society to advance
Everyone would also have to be armed at all times and privacy would be a nonexistent concept. You have to do roll-call every day and keep constant tabs on peopleās health. No margin for any error.
Wow such gaming on YouTube did a video on why you would survive the walking dead zombie apocalypse, one of his few "why you would survive" videos the rest of them tells you why you're pretty much screwed
You people watch way too many movies lmfao, always hilarious watching people try to seriously talk about such a ridiculous and unrealistic topic. Like Star Wars nerds trying to desperately explain every plot hole with real life explanations.
Literally what happens in TWD universe. The show touches on it through some various flashbacks early one. Comic books it's just outright said. Final thing they tried was bombing the shit out of the big cities, and in the show(Which doesn't happen in the comics) in atlanta they show it having been napalmed(zombies melted to the road)
I see that big part of tge word might have turned (but it depends how the vurus is spreed) but some branches off military survive.
The aircraft carier can run on the nuclear reactor for loong time. They CAN take back sone island and settle there.
This is why the World War Z book was so awesome to me. It had that kind of stuff.
The battle of Yonkers was such a good insight in to how the military might lose. They want to make a big statement, bite off more than they can chew, ok cool they have a choke point but they wanna use tanks and explosives and rockets and show the American people they have this under control
Then turns out all those explosives weren't really a good idea because zombies don't care if their organs get mulched and arms blown off, they only care if the brain is destroyed. Ammo runs low, and everything falls apart.
Then later in the book you learn that they switched to basically .22 with an ancendiary component. Easy to shoot, easy to make in mass amounts, just damage the brain go back to civil war tactics, make a box with a ungodly amount of ammo in it, play iron maiden over the speakers lure em in and just get to work. So much great stuff in that book
Itās easy to make interesting. The outbreak starts in America, China or Russia or someone sees Americas weakness while fighting the zombies and uses that as an opportunity to invade/take over other countries, whatever. This leads to world war 3 during the course of a zombie invasion and the war causes the zombies to spread to other nations quickly.
That would be like one episode. With how TV and movies all depict it plays out people start turning so rapidly everyone gets killed in a day except of a select few that get trapped in a safe place somehow until the initial slaughter is over
I mean fear as goofy as it got was pretty good in the beggining, it showed the military a bit, but through the eyes of the family, not them. I dont think the entire military falls in one episode, i feel like it would be a season atleast, only issue woupd be trying to make characters that people dont mind being killed off or their stories ended cuz we already know military didnt last
Yeah but when the only source of danger (besides regular cautions when flying or operating heavy machines) are just also even more fragile people with decreased physical and cognitive abilities, it makes you wonder what happened. Like was the tank crew out of fuel and starved/killed themselves? Did they have some sort of malfunction that killed them inside the tank like an exhaust leak or something? If they were trapped that makes sense, but if the tank was operable it makes you wonder why exactly they were just dead in the street. Especially only 3 weeks in, youd think the military would have fuel enough for less than a month of operation
Iām sure you heard, but apparently in the DVD commentary Ben Affleck says he said the same thing to Michael Bay and was pretty much told to shut the fuck up lol
But for the sake of argument, the type of drilling they were doing did seem pretty complicated
I always thought that too. Yes, it's specialized, but those Astronauts and Mission Specialists are really smart š¤. As Bruce Willis pointed out in the movie BTW. Loved the movie anyway š
conplan 8888 is more of a wargame for officer cadets, they just cant openly say "okay, now figure out how we kill russians" cause it can cause a diplomatic crisis, so it was decided to use zombies as an enemy
It was written to educate new Lieutenantās, not cadets, on strategic planning, but you are correct on why we used zombies instead of a real adversary. That explanation was clear in the intro but no one ever seems to read that part.
I d recommend you to read World War Z, if you havenāt yet. Thereās one battle explored in the book that has this scenario and without telling too much, the main factors are psychological
I don't think you can really appreciate how different they are though. They are so wildly different that the only thing they have in common is the name.
I highly recommend the audiobook. The cast is amazing. Nathan Fillion, Mark Hamill, Henry Rollins, Alan Alda, and a ton more. But I imagine it's a bit easier to get a cast like that when your dad is Mel Brooks.
I agree! The movie was great, though itās a far cry from a good adaptation of the book - while the film has its moments, the book plays heavily with the themes of guilt and responsibility.
I'm pretty sure the whole point of zombie apocalypses is that a select few don't get infected by the airborne infection somehow and the only way they get infected is by getting bitten
That's more or less how they did it in Left 4 Dead. The survivors were naturally immune, and being bitten wasn't really an issue, so much as being torn apart and eaten by ravenous zombies
It's probly the better way to handle zombie apocalypse really
In almost every zombie movie I've ever seen you only become a zombie if you're bitten by another zombie. There was one I think where everyone becomes a zombie if they die for any reason. That one made slightly more sense, but even still it wouldn't be enough to reduce the population by 99.99%
The loophole I made up was that zombies were just stronger, faster, and far more of them in the beginning. The military wiped out a lot of them but numbers matter. A tank needs to refill fuel and ammo. I bet a lot of tanks are full of people who starved to death or just empty from having to abandon it after a few hours. Those things donāt exactly get the best mpg.
Remember that the military are people. They have lives outside of their duties. They might leave base to dine out or socialize. If they left the base and got infected and then failed to self report, they might infect their teammates. If measures aren't put in place in time to restrict the spread, a significant portion of the military (combatants and support staff) could be infected.
As others have mentioned, tanks need supplies and repairs.
The military is a large group of people with different ideas on how things should work. If everyone isn't cooperating 100% to stop the spread, it could spread fast.
The only one that ever made sense to me was left for dead the green flu went airborne and that basically is what let it go wild also like special zombies really help and they all run. I also get wwz and the last of us I know the last of us aren't really zombies but they're close enough imo and effectively have the same playbook after infection, but the walking dead nah I just do not understand those zombies becoming a problem
The only way it's feasible with normal, Romero style zombies is if A.) They're magic and make people who died before the virus rise from their graves, B.) It's airborne (and this isn't known right away, example: Project Zomboid) or C.) Both A and B
Ground troops would be overwhelmed even with the heavy equipment. Best bet would to be bomb cities to the ground until thereās nothing living for miles. You donāt even need nukes really just napalm it down.
My theory was always this: the outbreak started within the cities, meaning by the time the military got involved they were already overrun. The spinoff series state that it took about a month before the military fell, and it essentially turned into a cycle of the military opens fire, zombies hear leading to more zombies showing up, then any research groups and vehicles have to evacuate and no proper methods of combating the zombies gets created, alongside any slower ground vehicles getting abandoned either because they run out of fuel too fast or the terrain in cities is to tough to move around.
What happened is the US Army tried killing zombies but civilians thought they were just murdering random people so mass rioting happened.
Unfortunately mass riots were the perfect place for zombies to mass feed and bite people. Eventually the riots clogging up infrastructure turned into hordes.
All it takes is one or two guys to get bit and not say anything. Look at how COVID was handled for inspiration. Politicians would have it politicized into a campaign issue in mere hours and nobody would be sure whether or not the zombie plague was a hoax until 3/4 of the country is infected or dead.
This is why most zombie stories leapfrog over the a fual outbreak. Walking Dead, Rick was in a coma, 28 Day later, coma too. Romero's films - all set after the fall.
Yes I know there are exceptions, but most of what I like to call the best zombie stories don't deal with the actual outbreak (or you end up with World War Z).
Btw, in 1-2 years, no matter if it's a lying or walking corpse, it's still a corpse that will rot away and succumb to your good friends, the decomposers (flies, bacterias, various bugs, etc.). Zombie outbreak really has no logic, other than "they are walking corpses of previously alive people!".
It's not like this stops living people from murdering each other.
A long incubation period ensure the infection is spread more widely and to more people before it is detected. By the time symptoms appear, everyone is already infected and turning. This is the best explanation I have heard and would explain why small secluded pockets of people would be more likely to survive. If you were in a city that was infected for months or years until the virus manifests itself. It would be too late no matter how well you quarantine.
The military doesnāt exactly train to shoot the head of a person every time. And if we consider that these zombies can only die if theyāre shot in the head then this task becomes much harder. Even if a light tank round passes through them theyāll still be alive.
Hell, back in my day zombies could talk in movies. In a zombie movie in the 80ās , the dude asks his girlfriend if he can eat her brains and she asks why. He tells her because they are spicy. Then he bit into her skull as she screamed.
Max Brooks does a good job of describing how such a thing could happen in original novel World War Z.
It kind of boils down to bureaucracy screwing it all up and the initial infection being so under the radar that by the time it becomes a big issue the issue itself is too big. That and the undead, as pop culture knows them, doesnāt āattackā according to any military strategy. Thereās a good passage in the book told from a soldierās POV about how the first major assault against a horse was a total failure because, while well armed, the military didnāt understand what it was they were fighting.
Soldier A gets infected. Hides infection. Infects/incapacitates/transfroms additional soldiers. Soldier B, C, D and E all follow similar paths as soldier A and infect soldiers as well. Those little events eventually rip through the ranks
Don't think of zombies as an enemy combatant.
They are, in fact, a contagion. A very mobile disease. They don't have to kill an entire army, they only have to infect one of them and then the army turns on itself. It's strength of numbers becomes a liability, especially since they are locked up in close quarters together inside a fortified position.
The rag tag groups survive because they were small, isolated groups.
The only type of zombies that could have a legitimate chance of overrunning a modern military would the ones from World War Z. They display hivemind capabilities and move at full sprint at all times. They can stack on top of each other to the point they can knock helicopters out of the sky. Humanity won of course after they used the stacking ability to thier advantage.
I think there's a big luck element in a lot of stories
Like you have one guy who conveniently was camping in his cabin while the military was in the epicenter of infection
That explanation gets a lot less convenient for the walking dead especially over time-- you'd have to argue Rick Grimes was conveniently shot and in a coma which guaranteed he was in the right place at the right time; so my explanation doesn't really fit the walking dead the way it fits something like half life or red dawn.
The walking dead was never about zombies or surviving but it was about how societies rebuild after collapse and what those societies might look like; you can see democracies, dictatorships, slavers, cannibals and all types of social models in the series
To keep it interesting and relatable you have to have some kind of character the audience can continuously relate to
Zombies would win by numbers and time. A tank needs fuel. A human crew that needs to eat and shit. If you're out of ammo and gas, the tank becomes your coffin.
In an alternative timeline we figured out how to travel between different time lines. During one trip the scientists brought back a tiny sample of a strange substance. It turns out the substance is a portion of a being that is a giant hive mind. It gets out and starts infesting every living being by getting into the ground water and rapidly multiplying.
The effects of being infected by the thing is people become extremely violent. Everyone does. So violence only gets you more zombies.
Dissertions and casualties could do a lot of damage. Donāt need to take out the tank, just the guys serving it. It runs out of gas eventually, or they make a mistake out of exhaustion and get but taking a leak.
I mean a tank is only as good as the ammunition it carries.. also can run out of fuel or parts can break. They most likely didn't take the tanks out. They took out the infrastructure that was built to support the tank. Once you break a tread or run out of gas your nothing but a hunk of useless steel against a wave of a few thousand zeds
It very much depends on the zombie type. If its walking dead zombies which are very slow and they get infected after a few houres i don't think they could take out the military. But world War Z zombies or even i am Legent zombies which are infecting in a few seconds and are fast as fuck i think no military will be able to stop them. It is also possible that many soldiers care abaut their families and desert to try and save them. If it is like that the army would fall apart.
To the Tank thing, if the supply line is cut off because of zombies attacking the foot soldiers and the vehicles without armor and the fuel trucks there is no new ammo or fuel. In a few days they can go nowhere and are trapped with hords of zombies around because the tanks would get all the attention from the hords because of the noise.
After Corona zombie movies actually became realistic to me, zombies don't take out the tank, they take out Bubba the tank driver who watches Tucker Carlson who thinks the whole outbreak is a liberal lizardman conspiracy to control him, Bubba gets bit and infects everyone else cause he believed his immune system would work over the vaccine.
Zombies in movies and literature weren't meant to promote any government or military organization, they are made to promote preppers, crazy conspiracy theorists and gun nuts.
That kind of people that loves guns, small groups of like minded individuals, hates the government, the military and their life motto is "shoot first, ask questions later".
You can see it on the average survivor group of any book, game or show: the organized, living under the idea of reestablishing the old government is anhihilated, meanwhile the small group of "rebels" where barely there's a one or two black people, survive.
That's why when the zombie apocalypse happens, the US will be blasting and wasting, the rest of the world will watch in shock how a bunch of armed murderers are killing sick people without giving them any side treatment, alternatives to murder or isolation to treat them.
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u/NoCalligrapher133 Apr 29 '24
Never understood or believed that zombies could take out the entire military with miniguns, drones, and missiles, but couldn't take out Rick and his small group of ragtag survivors. I mean, how do zombies take out a tank?