Return of Dawn of the Dead

I want to watch the new Dawn of the Dead again, which says something about my movie-watching habits. I watch Paris, Texas once, and I think I know everything about it. With Dawn of the Dead, I feel as if I have only scratched the surface, so I need to watch it again. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but sometimes pop culture holds some hidden gems, and this one is definitely pop culture: special effects, terrible acting, and all-around silliness. I'm not sure if it holds any hidden gems, but, boy, is it fun.

In case you don't know (or more appropriately, live with a spouse that doesn’t let you watch horror films), Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) is a remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). Like many people I know, my spouse doesn’t let me watch horror movies (I have to watch them after she goes to bed), and my libraries don’t have the original version, so I haven’t seen Romero’s original in many years. From what I remember, though, it was very different from this remake, in ways that make it sometimes less interesting.

Snyder’s version has some great points. In fact, I think it’s one of the better horror films to come out recently. It begins with some scenes that continually caught me off guard, even though we all know what is eventually going to happen. It open as a nurse sees some bizarre stuff in her night shift, but nothing is so remarkable that it makes much of an impression on her. One memorable part occurs as the nurse is leaving: she sees some paramedics bring in a badly wounded guy on a gurney, and as she walks out of the hospital, she sees the ambulance there with two legs sticking out of the back. She gets startled and goes over to it, thinking that something has happened to the driver, which is the same thing we are thinking, but it’s just the paramedic resting. And that’s genius, yes it is. That’s the way horror movies are supposed to work. Snyder knows that we know what is going to happen—the world is going to be taken over by zombies—so he has to make the lead-in play on that knowledge. I kept expecting a zombie to appear everywhere during the first fifteen minutes, whether at her car window, in the morgue, in the ambulance, or on her doorstep. And the movie knows this! So it keeps messing with me, teasing me, letting me into this person’s normal life, until it all goes to hell in a way I wasn't expecting.

And to hell it goes pretty quickly. We don’t just see one zombie here—no way, there are immediately hundreds of them everywhere, killing everything, and they cause all kinds of chaos. With zombies running everything, there is of course no power, no water, no TV, no nothing. Eventually, this group of survivors is left with nothing, which would have made this an appropriate remake for 1999-2000. The zombies here are not the caricatures of old, either. Sure, some of them are funny looking, but they’re fast, too, more like in 28 Days Later (2003) than in Night of the Living Dead (1968). When they see people they want to eat, they immediately go after them en masse.

So Snyder’s version is smart, but really only a technical or plot level. That’s where this one fails the original. If I remember it correctly, the original had more about consumerism. Here, it seems to be a coincidence that the survivors hold up in a shopping mall, whereas in the original it was a comment on our consumer society. We get one comment from Ving Rhames’s character that the zombies go to the mall perhaps out of habit or instinct, but this idea is never developed. Yeah, it’s a good hideout, but the story never reaches anything beyond the plot level, or even nearing the level of allegory. The way the people attempt to escape to a create a new life could be allegorical, but the movie doens't explore this idea--it's ripe for it, but it doesn't let us go there. Zombies are not a metaphor here, not like in previous zombie films (fear of nuclear holocaust, fear of technology, rage); they’re just zombies, and you have to get away from them or they will eat you.

Which makes for a decent horror film, but I don’t think it moves much beyond that. That movement beyond is what I generally appreciate about horror movies, and this one just doesn't deliver it. Still, it’s a fun ride.

Grade for Dawn of the Dead: 6