Dawn of the Dead Discussion

I'll have to watch it tomorrow Cinemaddiction.........just reporting what I've read on many movie sites around the net.

Having cameo appearances by stars of the original really has nothing to do with the story of either movie........it doesn't make it "like the original" in any way. Tom Savini also played in From Dusk 'till Dawn.....it wasn't like Dawn of the Dead.

The only thing I see you've listed that is the same in both movies is:

They use trucks to barricade the entrances to the mall
They comment that there hasn't been a broadcast in 3 days

General Plot of Dawn of the Dead:

4 people flee the city........end up in a mall. They fight the hordes of zombies, barricade the mall and kill all the zombies. They now have the mall to themselves. A biker gang enters the mall to loot it. The biker gang begin to fight with the protagonists of the story. The protagonists let the zombies in to the mall. The biker gang leaves. Everybody is dead except two people at the end who flee in a helicopter.

There really isn't a whole lot of plot to Dawn of the Dead. If 8/10 of what's listed above isn't even in the film it's a bad remake because they are completely changing the story. As you pointed out......they made THEIR OWN movie......so why throw Romero's Dawn of the Dead name on it? Either it's Romero's movie....or it's their own movie. Just like TCM, they throw a recognizable name onto the movie in search of the almighty dollar, even though it is not the same movie done over......it is a completely different movie. Which is wrong. The movie looks great and by all accounts is very good.......whoring out the name Dawn of the Dead is a blemish on that achievement.

Night of the Living Dead......now that was a remake. It stayed true to the original. Minor changes were made......minor. It was still the movie Romero created.....only recreated by Tom Savini. It was done so well because Savini himself is good freinds with Romero and worked on Martin, Dawn and Day......he had respect for the project. He didn't want to make his own version of a classic film, basically make his own movie and whore it out by throwing somebody else's movie's name on it. He simply updated the story a bit. The plot remained the same........

As I said....I will watch tomorrow and see if the movie is anything like the original. I expect to see a tongue in cheek satire about how materialistic our society is and human behavior with some zombies thrown in to bring the plot (characters, catalyst situation) together. I hope you are right and that is what I get. I somehow get the feeling I'm in store for a fast paced thriller type movie pitting man against zombie and humans struggling to survive. If that is what it turns out to be......nothing wrong with that. It doesn't make it a bad movie (It worked great in 28 Days Later).....it just isn't the plot to Dawn of the Dead.

1. This belongs in the horror forum

2. Kes, pointless to move it........there are already numerous threads in the horror forum about this movie. This would just be another duplicate thread..........probably better just to lock it.

3. I saw Dawn of the Dead 13 years ago.........you havn't seen it yet?

just so you don't think I'm making stuff up about a movie I havn't seen..........

Few of the original movie's political and philosophical preoccupations (abortion, capitalism, patriotism, individualism) remain. Instead, the remake feels like the product of the PlayStation era. At some point, the gang discovers that the only way to destroy their relentless assailants is to aim the gun above the neck. So a fresh shooter is always instructed to ``aim for the head!'' All that's missing are crosshairs.

But the movie is weak on attempts at survivalist philosophy (anyone bit by a zombie is likely to become one). Even the religious overtones feel tinny and unpronounced. But it is well-schooled in the dynamics of sitcoms and television dramas. Love stories and mea culpas abound.

Things get interesting in the closing minutes, though. Someone picks up a camcorder, and ``Dawn of the Dead'' comes down with an inspired, chilling but cheap case of ``The Blair Witch Project.'' The ultramodern gear change is risky but too much too late. How much harder to shake would this film have been had it switched formats at the halfway point?

Video might just be the final frontier for horror, which is too junked up with noise, formulas, and the witless bravado of mediocre directors to matter anymore. It's how thousands of amateur home-moviemakers capture immediate reality. Exploiting that ``amateur'' technology to spook us is a stroke of brilliance, conveying an end-of-the-world darkness in a format we associate with truth. This is an idea grasped by both the makers of the smarter, more rigorously structured ``28 Days'' and the boys behind ``Blair Witch.''

``Dawn of the Dead'' is afraid to commit to a similar mood of digital doom, however. In the end, it's no substitute for either of those movies or, even more so, Romero's own idea of rancid humanity.

Wesley Morris can be reached at [email protected].

http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=2652

BY ROGER EBERT

The contrast between this new version of "Dawn of the Dead" and the 1979 George Romero original is instructive in the ways that Hollywood has grown more skillful and less daring over the years. From a technical point of view, the new "Dawn" is slicker and more polished, and the acting is better, too. But it lacks the mordant humor of the Romero version, and although both films are mostly set inside a shopping mall, only Romero uses that as an occasion for satirical jabs at a consumer society.

The 1979 film dug deeper in another way, by showing two groups of healthy humans fighting each other; the new version draws a line between the healthy and the zombies and maintains it. Since the zombies cannot be blamed for their behavior, there's no real conflict between good and evil in Zack Snyder's new version; just humans fighting ghouls. The conflict between the two healthy groups in the Romero film does have a pale shadow in the new one; a hard-nosed security guard (Michael Kelly) likes to wave his gun and order people around and is set up as the bad guy, but his character undergoes an inexplicable change just for the convenience of the plot.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/wkp-news-dawn19f.html

"Dawn of the Dead" is a big-bucks remake of George Romero's grisly 1978 horror classic about a zombie army besieging an all-American shopping mall. But despite a big budget, lots of technical flair and a good cast headed by Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames, it's mostly a bloody mess.

Romero's movie was both scary and satiric, but this reprise, directed by British TV-ad wiz Zack Snyder, is neither. It's a blood-spattered zombie of a picture, almost as violent, soulless and drenched with gore as the undead mob that keeps trying to break into the movie's super-mall to kill the cliched characters inside.

For an hour and a half we watch this loony crowd, both living and dead, being stabbed, shot, skewered, bitten, run over and blown sky-high, after a plague of zombies mysteriously overruns Milwaukee (re-created in Toronto). Both the movie and the epidemic strike with unnerving speed.

One day, a zombie turns up in the local hospital. The next morning, wide-eyed nurse Ana (Polley) sees both hubby and child turn into zombies as well. Fleeing, she barely gets out of her neighborhood alive.

Soon, Milwaukee and its suburbs are in flames, and Ana and a few other survivors, including surly cop Kenneth (Rhames) and brainy Michael (Jake Weber), are holed up in the local mall. Outside, a ravenous mob of the undead creates a living hell.

The movie is hell to watch too. Some of the characters - Ana, Kenneth and Michael - are heroic.

Some are craven or villainous, like tart-tongued rich creep Steve (Ty Burrell) and, initially, the mall's three macho security guards, led by sullen CJ (Michael Kelly). Some are tragic, like the desperate couple (Mekhi Phifer and Lindy Booth) trying to save their unborn, undead zombie baby.

Living or dead, the characters, concocted by "Scooby Doo" scribe James Gunn, behave predictably and senselessly. One can excuse the zombies' stupidity, milling around in the parking lot, crashing against shatterproof doors. But the non-zombie characters are almost as bad. Why do they spout nonstop nonsense; run off, unprepared, to investigate mysterious noises; and show so little interest in cell phones or radios, beyond local calls?

Meanwhile, more zombies and even a dog sneak in and out of the mall. Nearly every plan the humans cook up fails, despite the fact that their opponents are brain-dead. Indeed, in this movie, having no brains seems to be an advantage.

Rhames still packs a mean glower, and Polley sports a nice anxious stare. And though director Snyder is good with action choreography, and with crane and helicopter shots, the overall effect is both gruesome and numbing.

Back in 1978, Romero, making a sequel to his low-budget 1968 gem "Night of the Living Dead," spent a lot more time than these filmmakers on setup and plausibility. Romero wanted us to believe, on some level, in the gory little world he was creating. He was able to give us a good, scary ride and make funny, nasty jibes at consumer culture and '70s nihilism.

Snyder and company just seem bent on taking us for a bloody ride. This "Dawn" doesn't try much for satire. It just goes for the gore and, even if most of the cast is eventually put out of their misery, the audience is less mercifully handled, even at the end credits, the most violent and annoying I've seen recently. Sometimes even death - or the end of a bad movie - is no release.

http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/movies/mmx-040318-movies-review-mw-dawnofthedead,0,6430971.story?coll=mmx-movies_top_heds

I find the bold text of that last review rather ironic.......as Romero himself states on the Dawn dvd commentary that he wrote the script in three weeks while in Italy as a guest of Dario Argento. He didn't even care about the characters......he said he didn't care about that stuff. He was making a movie about something......he started with the themes he wanted to underly the entire movie, then went back and threw characters and plot devices around the themes.

The general consensus is that the plot of these two movies are in no way the same. Romero made a movie satirizing our society whereas the new movie is just a cool blood and guts straight up zombie flick with no real underlying theme. Basically....eyecandy. I shall see it tomorrow and judge for myself.

Tight, whatever.
In the original Dawn of the Dead, the zombies do use instruments.
I watched it this morning.
When the blonde guy is hotwiring a truck a zombie picks up a tyre wrench and trys to hit him.
Also, the eyepatched scientist on the TV broadcasts says that they do.

Why can't they just have the original directors to help out in the re-makes of their films? It would be better and the director could say how he or she done this or that. Making the re-make exactly as the original.

I think that someone thought that "Dawn" was such a great movie, that they just wanted to make it a straight up horror, with no undertones or subliminal messages.

I already acknowledged that it's not a direct re-make, and thats not what was being strived for with the updated version, it just took the fun part of the movie, and modernized it.

It's definately not a scene by scene re-make, but a re-telling, so that it would fair well with today's audience.

So, no, it has very little to do with the original storywise, aside from the zombies and the mall. It's an action packed zombie and gorehounds kind of movie.

Moving and merging with older thread.
Moving--moved

I stand by CinemaAddiction on this one. I think they did a great job.

i think that they did a great job with the remake. but i really dont see how it was given the Dawn of the Dead name. the only reasons that i could honestly think that they gave it the Dead name was to sell tickets. granite there are alot of reference to the original, but the movie it self is a whole new movie.

of course with zombie movies there were a couple scenes that i didnt quite understand, but i guess they used them to keep the story moving.

Spoiler:
like when the girl steals the truck to get the dog. well driving a clutch on a moving truck like that is a tough thing to do, how the hell did she manage?

when they were armoring up the trucks in the garage, wherent there zombies in there? the cut scene from when they were traped in the garage to them back in-sdie was too jumping.

and of course one of my pet peaves of all movies is the humon common sense. like when they sent the dog to the gun guy, why didnt they tell him not to get biten? and why dont people in zombie movies ever make themselves armor?

and i didnt enjoy the sense when the old guy chops the girl with the chainsaw. even tho the Special Effects were great, the whole purpose of those characters were to die a t that sense and cause hte bus to flip. why did the old man pull ut hte chainsaw anyway, while they were flying back and forth through the streets?

i really enjoyed the zombies being more mobile. because unlike the original, one or two zombies are a pain in the ass and are harder to kill. i think it gives the movie the feeling that it is impossible to escape.

but if i had to choose i would give the movie 4 out of 5. not as good as the original but still a great damn zombie movie.

wow alot better then I was expecting 8.2 out of 10. If your gona see it see it in theaters probably only way of enhancing the movie experiance.

agreed........great flick.

But I still think they shouldn't have whored out the name Dawn of the Dead. I would have appreciated the movie a lot more if I could have viewed it as "man...this is a good movie" instead of "man....they are butchering a classic"...........

Was is a good remake? No........was it a good movie? yes.

I smell a merge..

It was a good movie. But the zombie baby was horrible. I especially liked the beginning when we saw insanity ingulfing the county as the epidemic was spreading.

The zombie baby was kind of a dumb idea.

Evil Dead-- if they hadn't used the name Dawn of the Dead for this one everyone would be complaining about how they ripped off the original DotD.

Originally posted by Evil Dead
where did you pull all that from ejay1? Nowhere in any of the three Dead films does it say why the dead have risen. It doesn't even hint at a reason.

Yes in NOTLD and the remake of it said so. In the remake the man in the news said a sattelite from space crash landed and caused the dead to rise. The cemetery is where most of the zombies came from in the NOTLD and the remake of it. If you think about it where are most cemeteries located, near the city and heavily populated areas. That is why in Dawn and Day the zombie infection was so destructive.

Very good point. I didn't much care for the zombie baby, but they had to do something with the pregnancy, so it seemed somewhat significant.

stay for credits i left n missed some stuff can some 1 post wat happend during credits n e 1???

I saw it last night, it was good. I liked it more then the original. I think that one guy, the father of the baby, (I don't remember his name) was a sick, crazed, freak. I mean I would have shot her when she died. But no he wanted to have a dead zombie baby

It showed them on the boat and then they ran out of gas and food. Then finally they find a island, only there's zombies there to. So we see them shooting and then the camera falls and we're left staring at a zombie's mouth