Release Date: March 19, 2004
Starring: Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer, Ty Burrell, Michael Kelly, Bruce Bohne
Directed by: Zack Snyder
Written by: James Gunn
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (pervasive strong horror violence, gore, language, sexuality)
There’s a good chance the first 10 minutes of Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead will scare the socks off many viewers, and make George Romero fans giddier than ever. It’s after that slick opening that things start rotting like a corpse in the midday sun -- when the story realizes it needs actual human characters, not just well-costumed zombies, to make for a passable, feature-length horror. The movie has maybe one or two multi-dimensional characters, a few clever scenes, and a macabre sense of humor, but little else to qualify itself as more than a senseless zombie flick.
The filmmaker Romero came up with the original in 1978, as his first sequel to the classic Night of the Living Dead. Now, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Planet of the Apes, a modern “re-imagining” is here, and this time it’s in the form of a louder, gorier, and more crowded version of what zombie enthusiasts still worship as a classic. The setting has been changed to the present day, and the number of non-zombified characters now totals about two dozen. Last time Romero kept the character count to around four, which would have been the smarter choice for this movie as well.
Sarah Polley plays the main character, an overworked Wisconsin nurse who wakes up one morning to the terrifying realization that her neighborhood, and soon the entire area (and possibly the entire world), has been overrun by flesh-eating monsters -- there is no explanation where they have come from, only that these zombies ultimately cause their victims to turn into zombies themselves, multiplying their numbers exponentially.
Following a very horrifying scene of chaos that has Polley’s character escaping her suburb while dodging zombies and out-of-control cars, she happens to come across a police officer, played by Ving Rhames. Together they find a few other survivors and seek shelter in a local shopping mall, and it’s there that they must survive and keep their unpleasant guests outside until they can figure out a way to escape.
From the start, the movie feels too crowded. Nearly all of the characters are so obviously zombie bait they may as well have been left out in the first place. There are a trio of unfriendly mall security guards that make things harder for the others, and their actions really only cause an additional and unnecessary sense of discomfort for the protagonists. Had the guards been picked off early on by the monsters their roles may have been justified, but they actually last most of the movie and take away from the more unsettling element of the story. Doesn’t everyone remember that there are hundreds and thousands (and eventually hundreds of thousands) of walking corpses outside trying to get in?
Ving Rhames is the most at ease in his role, because plays the familiar part as the honorable tough guy everyone wants on their side. His character is the most effective in the film, particularly in some clever scenes when he communicates with another survivor (Bruce Bohne), the owner of a gun shop, who is stuck on a roof across the street from the mall using binoculars and dry-erase marker boards.
The funniest of these is when he’s telling the man, who happens to be ex-military, to pick off certain celebrity look-a-like zombies on the streets below with a sniper rifle. The two also conduct a game of chess through this form of correspondence, and it’s this type of intimacy that completely escapes the rest of the movie, thanks to the surplus of characters.
The 1978 film had two S.W.A.T. team members, a traffic reporter, and his girlfriend trapped in the mall, but this Dawn of the Dead has so many they can’t possibly all serve a strong narrative purpose. Some come and go so randomly they’re not even recognizable by the end. What’s the deal with the platinum blonde, the quiet husband of an overweight zombie woman, the nervous girl who becomes too attached to her pet dog, and the jerk of a rich guy who only knows how to deliver arrogant quips? There are plenty of others, but it’s actually hard to describe them all since their purpose is so terribly limited. In fact, Sarah Polley, the star herself, barely makes an impression on the others around her, and she becomes lost among the noise and confusion.
Because of this major flaw, this Dawn of the Dead remake is a zombie movie more along the lines of the mindless Resident Evil rather than the humanistic 28 Days Later. It sacrifices its chances to create an intimate, terror-filled atmosphere, settling instead for a hollowed-out action movie that has more blood than spirit (which is usually the case with most horror movies anyway). As a result, it really isn’t very scary at all. It definitely has gore, and maybe even a thrill here and there, but it’s nothing much you haven’t seen before. It certainly isn’t anything that will give you nightmares, like the realism of 28 Days Later or even the merciless evil of the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Once Dawn of the Dead’s extremely unsatisfactory ending comes along, it becomes dreadfully obvious just how empty the movie is. There is the sense that hardly anything was accomplished, and that’s true for the handfuls of useless characters as well as the viewing experience as a whole -- you’ll feel like you were just as unproductive with your time as they were.
-- Andy Zientek (zfilm@earthlink.net)