‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’ — World War II from inside Warsaw Zoo

In the opening moments of “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” director Niki Caro introduces us to a pocket paradise of every glorious form of creation — animals of every size and description — overseen by a team of benevolent human beings.

Though the war was and remains the greatest calamity ever to befall the planet, it has been the subject of too many movies, good and bad.

[...] the zookeeper’s wife calms the father elephant and helps out the mother.

The Zabinskis owned and ran the Warsaw zoo and, after the German invasion, used it as a transit point and refuge for Jews escaping the Warsaw ghetto.

Caro conveys the terror of the bombing by filming them from above, starting in panic as explosions are heard on the soundtrack.

For Chastain, Antonina is an ideal vehicle that crystallizes what she has been bringing to the screen since “Zero Dark Thirty” — portraits of strength and heroism.

There was the angry version (“Miss Sloane”), the flawed version (“A Most Violent Year”), the parody version The Huntsman:

Winter’s War, and the horror movie version (“Mama”), but the heroism is the same.

For Antonina, Chastain adopts the obligatory Polish accent that movies insist on (even though people don’t speak with accents in their own language), but she also alters her mannerisms, so that she seems Eastern European.

To ascribe the movie’s virtues to the gender of the filmmakers would be to minimize their individual achievements, but there are touches throughout that are not the usual thing.

The war was a great external event, but Caro reminds us that it was experienced internally, by the people and the animals that had to try to live through it.