r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Routine_Phase_8980 • 3d ago

Hated Tropes ( Annoying af trope ) When the good guys possess perfect defensive position/advantages that was completely ruined by someone's sheer stupidity, pettiness, or selfishness

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

I understand that these scenes must happen in order for the plot to continue but they still make me angry till today whenever I think about them because of how easy it could've been avoided. I doesn't mean these scenes are necessarily bad written, just hella hard to watch.

The Jerusalem Wall / The Singing Crowd (World War Z): Israel literally anticipated the zombie apocalypse and built a flawless, massive wall that kept everyone 100% safe. It was the ultimate safe haven. But then people inside started celebrating and singing on a microphone so loudly that it triggered a zombie pyramid, they didn't even stop until the first zombies started coming through. They have less survival instinct than an amoeba.

Ephialtes (300): The Spartans had the perfect phalanx formation at the Hot Gates. They were slaughtering the Persian army with minimal casualties and could have held them off for so much longer. Then this guy gets his feelings hurt because he can't lift a shield, throws a tantrum, and tells Xerxes about the secret goat path.

Grandma Jong-gil (Train to Busan): The survivors fought through hell and literal waves of infected to secure a safe train car. Sure, the crowd inside was selfish for locking them out at first, but everyone was finally safe inside. Then this grandma, fueled by grief and spite over her sister, decides to open the door and let the infected flood the entire car, killing everyone.

12.8k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

56

u/Ok-Cow-1399 3d ago

The book the movie is “based” on features Romero-style zombies, so in the book the wall is actually perfectly effective (the zombies are known to occasionally do the ramp thing in the movie, but at such a slow speed that you as a defender could stop it). The wall still gets slightly breached in the book, but it’s on purpose because of a civil war triggered by anger over abandoning Jerusalem and letting the Palestinians shelter in the safe zone.

63

u/BeegBunga 3d ago

"a civil war triggered by anger over [...] letting the Palestinians shelter in the safe zone."

too real

35

u/Mummiskogen 3d ago

I haven't read the book but i heard the story is more about geopolitics than actual zombies so that would add up

33

u/PilotMoonDog 2d ago

The book is a series of interviews with survivors done 10 years after the end of the war. The interviewer (Brad Pitt's character in the film) works for the UN and is tasked with gathering all sorts of statistics to stop such a thing happening again and does the interviews while he's doing that.

Multiple plot threads including a US Army veteran, An ex Japanese otaku turned monk alongside a blind survivor of Nagasaki. The crew of a Chinese missile submarine that escape with their families. The guilt wracked South African administrator who comes up with the plan to fort up & prepare to take back the infested areas. And others. Would really have made a better mini series than a film. Possibly animated to save on location costs.

The Israeli bit assumes that their intelligence figures out what is going on, quickly finished a containment wall and invites the Palestinians to come inside it. Not for any altruistic reason but to lessen the number of zombies that would be outside it. The settler movement objects to this, and also to infected Jews getting refused entry.

A sensible policy, but not one I could see the real Israeli government implementing.

12

u/jamesxgames 2d ago

would be such a good HBO-style miniseries

3

u/Citizen_Kong 2d ago edited 2d ago

Apparently the original screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski was much closer to the novel and so good that it was on black list of "best not yet produced screenplays" for a while. Soooo of course the studio let it be rewritten completely to turn it into more of a traditional action movie.

1

u/IShouldbeNoirPI 2d ago

I always suspected they already had scenario gathering dust and they just bought right to the book to ride on book popularity

2

u/SolidusDave 2d ago

Yeah, limited series format. (but still easy to do another series/season if successful).

Every episode could be headlined by a top actor (the interviewed person) for each scenario.

Updated for current geopolitics, tech etc.

Though I would keep the fast/wave-like zombie masses from the movie.

1

u/PilotMoonDog 2d ago

Nah. Some of the plot works on them being shamblers. And them being that was a homage to the Romero films. The book is played straight as a real memoir right up to the end when Brooks includes a dedication to Romero.

1

u/MillCrab 2d ago

Really does seem like a free space. Wonder what's keeping it from happening

6

u/Ifyougivearagamuffin 2d ago

it should have been Ken Burns' Zombies

3

u/WashingtonBaker1 2d ago

Told entirely with slow pans across a black&white photograph, accompanied by a grating old timey violin.

1

u/SemperMementoMori 2d ago

Not his only documentary, check his work out

5

u/eh-man3 2d ago

A truely amazing book absolutely ruined by the movie baring its name.

The audio book is great though. Adds to the framing device.

1

u/Shaiky1681 2d ago

I remember having trouble with the official audiobook skipping parts, which I mean yeah sure I can read them, but i remember it being such a jarring experience

1

u/Suspicious_Kitchen23 2d ago

Yes, when it was recommended to me, I was told to make sure it was the unabridged version, because the abridged version left out so much.

6

u/Ronald-Mc-Daddy 2d ago

The real Israel government would just kill all the Palestinians claiming they were infected before letting a single one into the wall lmao

3

u/Woodpecker-Lobotomy 2d ago

The real Israeli government is trying to kill all of the Palestinians for existing, right now

2

u/IShouldbeNoirPI 2d ago

More likely to preemptively shoot Palestinians. Well in fact they're already killing potential terrorist in their cribs

1

u/Vatnam 2d ago

Isn't there a chapter about North Korea where the regime just rips everyone's teeth out and then locks everyone underground?

1

u/Toxic724 2d ago

Yes and the concern is after the zombie war is “won” no contact has yet been made with NK. So the concern is that the infection made it into the caves and opening them up could release millions of zombies into the world.

1

u/LeafPankowski 2d ago

Yeah. The book is brilliant. I wish some streaming service would pick it up as an anthology series.

The Israel plot would have to be adjusted though. Probably to Israel intentionally locking them all outside (which I think some other nations do in the book, so it’s not really stretch.)

8

u/ClothesOverall3863 3d ago

Yeah that was Max Brooks whole point. He was fascinated by second order consequences

2

u/PositivelyIndecent 2d ago

I love the irony of post-war Cuba being a capitalist superpower and Tibet having the highest populated city in the world.

1

u/Suspicious_Kitchen23 2d ago

And Russia becoming a theocratic dictatorship with priests, who had originally taken on the task of mercy killing the infected now the governments hitmen. And no one really knowing what happened to North Korea, who's whole population vanishing.

2

u/rrenda 1d ago

it's hinted with context clues that all of North Korea is inside a gigantic bunker complex under the Taebaek Mountain Range, nobody knows if the North Koreans successfully screened the infected before sealing themselves in, and there's speculation inside the book that it may be the cause of another outbreak

7

u/M1sfit_Jammer 3d ago

It’s a lot of stories… geopolitics is part of that…

Some are stories of survival from individuals and other are stories from people with a bigger set of eyes on the situation

8

u/Thin-Nerve6367 3d ago

90% of zombie media is just "humans are the real enemy"

2

u/thunderdragonite 2d ago

It’s fine for someone brave to say zombies are the real monster in a movie.

3

u/Hesitation-Marx 2d ago

The zombies are the obvious monsters. But they don’t have a choice. Whatever made them get up and move is at fault.

The humans in a zombie movie? Well, the ones that choose to do horrible things are at fault. That’s the real monstrosity.

2

u/Suspicious_Kitchen23 2d ago

Right, the human's ranged from the con man who sold fake "zombie cures" now in hiding to soldiers who sacrificed themselves so that civilians had a chance to escape.

2

u/Hesitation-Marx 2d ago

In Night of the Living Dead, the Black protagonist lives through the zombie outbreak only to be murdered by cops.

It’s almost like Romero was tryin’ to say something…

4

u/Jeo_1 3d ago

The book is 100 times better than the movie. 

1

u/Hesitation-Marx 2d ago

Underselling it, tbh.

4

u/Jeo_1 2d ago

101 times better. My bad

1

u/MorgessaMonstrum 3d ago

I'd say the story is almost exclusively about geopolitics (during a zombie apocalypse), as told by individuals each experiencing it from their perspective.

1

u/MillCrab 2d ago

The book is definitely a lot (on a literary level) about exploring how different types of governments react to evolving crises. There's a lot more "success" and resilience in the book than the movie, which is basically just a runaway zombie apocalypse thriller. The book isn't eeally

1

u/EXusiai99 2d ago

Not really, because realistically they wouldnt have let the Palestinians in on the first place.

While it's true that Israel letting them in is more to reduce the potential amount of zombies outside of their borders than humanitarian reasons, there are other, more direct ways to achieve that.

4

u/Bignholy 2d ago

Do keep in mind the book is 20 years old now. There was still some concept of peaceful resolution back then, before the world collectively lost its shit.

7

u/hortonian_ovf 2d ago

Book Israel (implied but not confirmed) to fall to the zombies because the ultra zios start a civil war over offering sanctuary to Palestinian returnees and withdrawing to their UN resolution borders. And the end state is a unified one state solution after the zombies.

Movie Israel lets the arabs in and everyone dies because the arabs sang too loud.

What did the writers mean by this?

2

u/Suspicious_Kitchen23 2d ago

I thought it was the Israeli's and Palestinians all singing together?

4

u/No_Kangaroo_9826 2d ago

I've read the book so many times and cannot express my loathing for this movie

1

u/cpt_hatstand 2d ago

Yep, was gutted when I saw it, what is great about the book is the way it's just different accounts and short stories that kind of link together, but are individual experiences of the zombie war and documents of the events that happened on national/regional scale due to mismanagement and geopolitics.

It could of been a brilliant movie, it was instead, mindless wank.

1

u/No-Way7911 2d ago

They had to make sure that you knew the singing Arabs were the stupid bad guys in the movie