- Directed by Zack Snyder
- Written by James Gunn, based on a screenplay by George A. Romero
- Starring
- Sarah Polley
- Ving Rhames
- Jake Weber
- Mekhi Phifer
- Ty Burrell
In the fourteen years between the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead and this unrelated remake of Dawn of the Dead, Hollywood had become the Great Engine of Reimagining, gaining great acumen in mining its own history to spin new movies from old. I don’t excuse the braindead impulse to wring the blood from every produced property instead of venturing into unlabeled territory, but I do acknowledge that the great Hollywood Engine has hit upon some strategies that work in its mammon-desperate labors. Thus, when the questionable decision was made to reimagine George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979), all they took from the original was the title and the basic premise: A bunch of people barricaded in a shopping mall during a zombie uprising. Maybe it was a canny awareness that the original was both a very individual vision and a very era-specific production, and that trying to graft the filmmaking sensibilities of three decades hence onto the body of the original would be new wine in old bottles; certainly the lesson of the Night of the Living Dead remake couldn’t have been lost on everyone involved. Whatever its genesis, this revision of Romero’s original scenario pulls far enough away from the original that, unlike the NOTLD remake, it can be judged on its own merits; and what’s more surprising, its own merits are fairly substantive.
This new version, mind you, fits comfortably within the Romero-style zombie scenario: Pretty young nurse Ana (Sarah Polley) ends her grueling shift in the suburban world she knows, and collapses into bed with her significant other Luis (Justin Louis); by the time she wakes in the morning, that world has gone straight to hell, and isn’t content to stay outside her door. The cute neighbor girl (Hannah Lochner) we met last night appears in their bedroom and rips out Luis’s throat with her teeth, and scarcely has Ana begun to comprehend that when Luis revives, hungry for her flesh, feral and murderous.
“Heeeere’s Johnny!”
And fast. That’s the main point of departure from the standard Romero-inspired zombie plague: These undead are not the shuffling corpses which are dangerous only by sheer numbers. Taking inspiration from the British pseudo-zombie film 28 Days Later (2002), the walking dead here are really the running dead, energetic and ferocious. In fact, they don’t seem terribly, well, dead. Unlike the standard Romero zombies which can be outpaced by a brisk stroll, these living corpses can run a man to ground and tear him apart like a wild beast. It scarcely seems fair, really; after all, the dead already outnumber the living, and are always amassing greater numbers thanks to whatever contagion it is that fuels them (a convention fully acknowledged here). It seems almost like stacking the deck that the dead are also tireless running-and-killing machines. Thank goodness they’re still stupid.
Though that’s not really an asset to the living. As Anna flees from her once-beloved and drives frantically from her subdivision, she sees abandoned and torched cars on ever street, fires and explosions in the distance. The infrastructure really wasn’t made to accommodate mass chaos, and it’s already toppling to earth. And that’s before the opening credits.
“We’re not going to spend the whole movie playing ‘Who’s got the phallus,’ are we? That’s more of a NOTLD thing.”
One of the few criticisms I had of the original Dawn of the Dead was that it took too long to establish its central premise. No such complaints here. As soon as the credits have finished rolling, Ana meets moody but capable police officer Kenneth (Ving Rhames), then a multiethnic group of three other survivors trying to find safe haven without being seen by the dead: white guy Michael (Jake Weber), black Andre (Mekhi Phifer), and Andre’s very pregnant Russian wife Luda (Inna Korobkina). They quickly assess their options, and decide to make for the shopping center.
Thanks to most of the infection having spread overnight, the mall is almost completely clear of the living dead. It’s also locked down tight, but that doesn’t present too much problem. What does present a problem is a trio of security guards who have decided that their ward is their fief: CJ (Michael Kelly), the leader with sinister facial hair; Bart (Michael Barry), the wanna-be-cool whiteboy; and Terry (Kevin Zegers), the trainee who was cast apparently to appeal to the wimp-chic WB demographic. With all the egos on display, even the entire shopping mall might be a tight squeeze, but everyone figures they can deal with each other until help arrives.
“Hmm… Maybe we should try ‘Blow-Out Sale at Old Navy.’”
But help doesn’t arrive. Instead, television stations go off the air, the dead start massing in the mall’s parking lot, and the survivors start to find out how quickly the infection can be spread by a mere bite. Thank goodness they can barricade themselves inside for a while and pretend to ignore the outside world, thanks to the miracle of electricity. (News flash: The nation’s energy grid could survive maybe twelve hours unattended before going down in a cascade effect, a fact which it’s easier to overlook in the original Dawn of the Dead, as the zombie invasion seems to take place more by attrition than mass pandemonium. Here, though, when explosions and urban fires show the extent of the violence before we even see the credits, it’s a little harder to swallow the idea that the electricity keeps right on sparking for the indeterminate number of weeks that our protagonists are in the mall.)
I’d be the first to admit that the remake is a much less thoughtful movie than the original. Romero has always used story as a means to explore social issues, and thus the original was a remarkably inactive movie in order to allow time for his subtextual critique of media personalities and the consumer culture of the “me” generation. The remake largely jettisons subtext, though it by no means is a stupid movie, nor are obvious moral and ethical dilemmas glossed over in the service of gory zombie action; one question that must be dealt with as soon as they realize how the infection spreads is what to do with a live person who has been bitten, and who will inevitably die of the wound and then return as a killing machine. (Perhaps for me this test case was made a little easier by the fact that it was Matt Frewer who was bitten. Even before he started showing the sluggishness and pallor of someone who’s soon going to be living-impaired, I was chanting, “Frewer’s gonna di-ie, Frewer’s gonna di-ie…”)
And here, the dead take the tricky “Dalek stair challenge”…
But what the movie lacks in depth, it makes up in headlong momentum. This is not a movie that can stand around and bask in the bombastic ambiance of lumbering apocalypticism; the dead are fast and fierce, and the action follows suit. These people don’t just sit around in the paradisaical consumer nirvana until bikers break through and punctuate their equilibrium; when the electricity goes down and some of their numbers succumb to infection, they plan an all-out escape, trying to make it to the marina and from there to one of the small islands in the lake. Which means that the last twenty minutes of the movie is nothing but energetic mayhem, as their numbers dwindle and join the undead enemy…
“FREEBIIIIRD!!”
Between this movie and Shaun of the Dead from the same year, I think it’s becoming apparent that the standard Romeroesque zombie movie scenario has nothing left to tell us; there are only so many variations on the tale of a disparate group of survivors in a world overrun by the living dead. Granted, as soon as one tries to apply a necessity test to the world of entertainment, most of the industy would dry up and blow away. And I’m not blaming this movie for the state of the genre; this is actually an entertaining and well-made movie, and even ventures into transgressive territory more than once. But the corpse is getting a little stinky; there’s a limit to how many times even this zombie plot can be revived.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 21
- breasts: 4
- explosions: 7
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
- Matt Frewer (“Frank”) played “Professor Berlingoff Rasmussen” in the TNG episode “A Matter of Time”
- Justin Louis (“Luis”) played “Trevis” in the Voyager episode “Once Upon a Time”
- Bruce Bohne (“Andy”) played “Ishan” in the Voyager episode “Blood Fever”
- actors who appeared in the original Dawn of the Dead: 3
- Scott Reiniger, Tom Savini, and Ken Foree are each given a brief cameo
