Dawn of the Dead Review
by Andy Keast (arthistoryguy AT aol DOT com)March 29th, 2004
Dawn of the Dead (2004): **1/2 out of ****
Directed by Zach Snyder. Screenplay by James Gunn, based on an original screenplay by George Romero. Starring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer and Bruce Bohne.
by Andy Keast
The 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead" plays like a video game version of the original. George Romero's 1978 film is a classic American movie, and I went into this new one expecting only some gory zombie action, and not something that worked on any subtler level as Romero did. Here, CGI and music video photography are employed to show skin at its palest and blood at its reddest, which constantly made me think of a college boy's addiction to those computer games wherein the undead are hunted down with an endless supply of ammunition.
The "re-imagining" has an opening sequence (Sarah Polley's bedroom community is
quickly turned upside down by the living -and running- dead) and a credit sequence (a bizarre and bloody montage set against Cash's "The Man Comes Around") that I loved, although too much of the story's progression depends on characters doing stupid things.
Polley eventually meets up with a policeman (Ving Rhames), an everyman (Jake Weber) and some others. They make their way to the one thing intact from the original film: the mall, which this time is introduced as some kind of menacing
movie character, complete with oppressive music and a slow camera reveal. They
encounter a stooge trio of redneck security guards, the alpha of the troupe being a man with a handlebar moustache (Michael Kelly). There is a subplot involving Mekhi Phifer's character and his pregnant wife (Inna Korobkina) that had horror potential, but ends up being cartoonish. The film introduces a dozen new characters at the half-way mark, mostly to move the story forward by making fatal mistakes. I may have been able to forgive the movie for that had it not thrown the actors in and out of character so much.
There are a few digs at the original (one of the stores in the mall is named "Gaylon Ross"), and some attempts at "satire" that don't succeed as planned. One scene has mall security watching a local sheriff on television. "They seem
to go down permanently if you shoot them in the head," he says, ordering everyone watching to mow them down. Handlebars responds: "America always sorts
this shit out," and it comes off as a cheap shot.
Maybe you don't care about the original film and only want a bloody zombie movie. On a strictly visceral level, it's somewhat-enjoyable candidate for a Bad Movie Night. I'm no connoisseur of the genre, but I did think that this had some good killings for a major studio movie. People are smashed by trucks,
sawed in half, impaled and incinerated. Heads are blasted apart by gunfire. A
propane tank is used as a Molotov cocktail. I'm not ashamed to admit that in a
perverse and cathartic way, I got what I came for.
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