The novel was hardly a piece of art and it's got a ton of bad research and some downright insulting portrayals of the military
Completely wrong, of course.
It was my impression that the disease Pitt infects himself with is Meningitus, which is fairly easy to cure. I could be wrong, but that's what I heard them say in the quick sum-up at the end.
There were two things that pissed me off about the film, as opposed to the book (which was a work of art, did accurately portray the military, and rarely made a serious misstep when it comes to accuracy, believability or salience). The entire goddamn point of the book is that there are no easy solutions to problems. Two-thirds of the book is the slow, agonizing counter-attack, learning to defeat their formidable enemy, actually going about doing it, fucking up, losing friends, ect. So the film they creates an easy solution. Moronic.
The other
entire goddamn point of the book is that human institutions are not effective at dealing with rapid-onset major crisis that we've not dealt with before, the obvious comparison being climate change. In the book, people try to make money out of it, or they try to cover it up, they blame the people who actually try to do something about it (the Karl Rove character who does this from his Arctic bunker is, in my opinion, the single most true-to-life analogy of this phenomenon ever made. It's beautiful). People, individuals, do stupid shit, but institutions screw up much worse. The media, the army, various different states, (almost) none of them formulate an effective response; in fact, it falls to individuals to fix the problem as best the can. In the movie, every institution responds perfectly. The UN is perfect, the US government is perfect, the Israeli government is perfect. The zombie apocalypse happens not
because of an ineffective response, but
despite a very effective response! Again, moronic.
The other thing that was really annoying is that the "war" is, apparently, limited to Brad Pitt. He jet sets around the world
in the middle of a fucking nuclear war without giving any idea at all what the fight is like for anyone but him. That's the opposite of what the book did, as usual, again without a good reason and again making the story a lot more dull and uninteresting. Funny how changing the fundamental nature of one of the most beloved recently-written books, while retaining the title, will not actually retain the things that made it beloved. The film completely does away with the oral history, story-around-a-campfire feel, completely does away with the hard choices made by multiple characters (all hard decisions are made by Pitt), completely destroys the sense that everyone is living through a shared event like WW2, completely does away with the sense of combined effort, completely does away with survivalist themes, completely does away with the book's critique of social norms...
But, really, the movie didn't suck. It shouldn't have been called World War Z, of course, had nothing at all to do with the book, but it was an acceptable, stupid, action/survival flick.