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Forster and his collaborators deserve credit for plunging us into the thick of things: the Lanes learn that society is collapsing when a seemingly ordinary urban traffic jam is jolted into surreality by an explosion, a stampede of terrified civilians and their vehicles, and a furious attack by people who've been infected by a virus that turns them into ravenous ghouls. He's every other character played by Robert Redford in the 1970s and '80s: noble, brave, calm in a crisis, endlessly resourceful, kind to his spouse and children, respectful of authority but not slavishly so, independent-minded by not arrogant a snooze. Sometimes when you re-invent the wheel, the result doesn't get you very far.Д«rad Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a former United Nations field agent who retired to spend time with his wife Karin (Mirelle Enos) and their charming daughters. 'World War Z' is mostly David Lean-on-caffeine panoramas of computer-generated zombies swarming ant-like up walls and over barricades and taking down computer-generated choppers while Forster's close-up camera swings all over the place to generate unearned 'excitement.' The final setpiece watches three people sneak into a lab that's overrun by a few dozen sleepy and distracted flesh-snackers. Ironically, what makes the end work is its embrace of old fashioned zombie film values: intimacy, silence, suggestion, and the strategic deployment of boredom to lull viewers into complacency and set them up for the next big scare. It's not that scary until you get to the end. 'World War Z,' in contrast, is just bloody eye and ear candy.В I realize it's problematic to review a film on the basis of what it might have been, but when that same film substitutes a vision that's vastly less intriguing and original than the one offered by its source, it's a fair tactic, and what's onscreen here is just another zombie picture, gigantic but otherwise unremarkable. WhatВ better way to amplify the hideousness of the dead attacking the living than by fixing a camera's unblinking eye on the survivors as they talked about the homes and people and limbs they lost in the struggle? A friend who's heard the audiobook version of 'World War Z' said it reminded her of old time radio drama: 'Theater of the mind,' she said. A faithful transcription of Brooks' source might have taken fright-film minimalism even further.

The latter viewed an undead attack through the eye of a home video camera and treated the result as 'found footage' - a great post-'Blair Witch' embellishment, considering how much of horror's effectiveness lies in what you don't see. Such an approach might have yielded the first fresh contribution to the zombie pictureВ since 'Rec'. I've never read Brooks' book and don't have any immediate plans to, but the notion of telling this tale in a roundabout way, by having survivors of the conflagration sit there and talk to an unseen cameraperson-perhaps against a plain black background, with or without cutaways to still photographs or 'news video'-is electrifying to consider.

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I'm sorry, but before we take this movie apart, let's take a closer look at that last phrase: 'oral history of a zombie apocalypse.' Those six words tell you everything this film gave up by going in a conventional direction.