"World War Z," in contrast, is just bloody eye and ear candy. 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. What's onscreen here is just another zombie picture, only gigantic, and it's not too scary until you get to the end. Ironically, what makes the movie's final sequence unnerving is its embrace of time-tested low-budget zombie film values: intimacy, silence, suggestion, and the strategic deployment of boredom to lull viewers into complacency and set them up for the next scare.
Instead of the David Lean-on-caffeine panoramas of thousand of computer-generated zombies swarming ant-like up walls and over barricades and taking down computer-generated choppers while panicked generals watch on monitors from thousand of miles away and Forster's close-up camera wobbles and wiggles and swings all over the place to generate unearned "excitement", the drawn-out final setpiece follows three people sneaking into a building that's overrun by a few dozen sleepy and distracted flesh-snackers. And what do you know? It's pretty scary, and unintended proof that when you try to re-invent the wheel, the result doesn't carry you as far as you would have liked.