'World War Z,' in contrast, is just bloody eye and ear candy. What 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 picture 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. 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.
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