Originally posted 3/27/04
Dawn of the Dead
Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: James Gunn, based on a screenplay by George A. Romero
Producers: Marc Abraham, Eric Newman, Richard P. Rubinstein
Stars: Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer
I wanted to sleep before I wrote this review, not because the movie was boring. Far from it. I wanted to sleep so I could confirm something.
Yep, no nightmares.
There’s a difference between making someone jump and genuinely, deep down, scaring them. I can make my cat jump just by turning on the vacuum cleaner. The re-make of Dawn of the Dead is extremely proficient at making me jump. In terms of technique, effects, and imagination in depicting a world gone berserk, I quivered for long stretches like someone had turned the thermostat way, way down.
But only a few times did I feel lasting, my-world-has-been-shaken fear. George Romero’s zombie movies didn’t make me jump as often, but they could sure as hell do that. I haven’t watched the original Night of the Living Dead in years, and I still get nightmares from it.
You could argue that it’s unfair to compare them, and I will in due course address this re-make on its own merits. But by using the title, and by accepting the conventions of the zombie movie that Romero laid down – there’s almost as long a checklist as a James Bond movie – comparisons are inevitable.
There’s the spreading by bites. The character who hides an important wound. The character who can’t accept the conversion of a loved one into the undead. The coward whose aggressive need to be in charge causes more harm than good. And like its progenitor in name, there’s the ennui of being barricaded in a shopping mall with every material good that used to be important, but surrounded by thousands of cannibalistic ghouls, which takes all the fun out of it.
There’s a lot to like about this re-make, and its first-time director Zack Snyder. He doesn’t succumb to overboard slash-cutting or “bullet time”, but actually understands the difference between moving the camera and simply setting it on the sticks in front of a well-composed image, and uses both to full effect. Full kudos to cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti in that regard, too. Fighting zombies is never rock-out cool – it’s terrifying and exhausting, and mostly exciting to us because we’re relieved not to be taking part in it. The movie’s frequent and unexpected laughs stem from this principle, too.
While it has more money and resources than Romero has had in his entire career, it still works on the conventions of low-budget shockers. It’s a dirty, scrappy movie, clever in how it uses its small scope to not only make you feel oppressed and trapped, but simultaneously a helpless witness to the collapse of all civilization. That’s not easy.
The makers have learned from horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Alien that a handful of solid actors is worth a whole barrel full of plastic hot teens. James Gunn’s screenplay dips a little too often into self-consciously arch dialogue but ends up working; a little because you can accept circumstances are stressing these people out, but more because the actors sell it. When security guard C.J. (Michael Kelly) snaps – “You need to drink a tall glass of Shut the F*** Up!” it doesn’t sound snarky, it sounds like someone who thought of that days ago and could hardly wait for someone to show up he could use it on.
We open on Anna (played by the consistently under-appreciated Sarah Polley), a worn-out nurse at a hospital where weird things have been happening today. Ambulance drivers are getting busy a little earlier than usual, and there’s a lot of talking and not much music on the radio. But Anna just wants to get home to her peaceful suburban neighborhood and sleep with her peaceful suburban husband, which distracts her from the TV cutting to a Special News Bulletin.
It’s when she wakes up that things really go bad.
As the living dead sweep through her town creating chaos, she eventually hooks up with a group of survivors – Kenneth (Ving Rhames), a cop who’s hesitant to count on anyone or be counted on by anyone except himself; Michael (Jake Weber), who never could find much to be good at in civilization but proves a very capable leader; and a young couple (Mekhi Phifer, Inna Korobkina) trying to bring a baby into the world. They head to the mall together and work to secure it and survive. And none of it goes smoothly.
This is a movie that, and I say this as a compliment, enjoys its mayhem. It’s not enough to show a car fleeing down a two-lane highway. We get to see the car in front of it collide with a van, then the van flips over and explodes. It’s the kind of movie I used to listen for Joe Bob Briggs’ review of, because he’d score it by its many myriad ways of spilling blood.
3 Chainsawings. Two propane tanks used unsafely. Crowbar-Fu. Broken croquet-mallet-Fu. About 300 hit-and-runs. Joe Bob says check it out.
The zombies themselves have better make-up this go-around (original FX guru Tom Savini has a cameo as a sheriff with some very stern advice), and they move too. You could hold a track meet pitting them against the ghouls in 28 Days Later.
This may contribute to the whole more-jumping-less-scary paradigm. Romero’s lurching zombies were always just a little pathetic, like that nun stuck in the sliding door or the one who wrestles a gun away and peers thoughtfully down the barrel. They were a freakish parody of a life without any meaning except to consume – the shopping mall’s use as a satire of materialism is gone here, although they do remember the ironic Muzak. In the old days, you could probably shove one or two out of the way, it was their relentlessness and your own human weaknesses that wore you down. These zombies are more dangerous, if less layered, monsters.
But again, this is making comparisons. As I’ve said, there’s a lot to like about this Dawn of the Dead. I like Andy (Bruce Bohne), holed up in the gun shop across the street, communicating with signs from his roof. I like Steve (Ty Burrell) who, with no yuppies left to compare clothes with, elevates being obnoxiously unhelpful to a kind of full-time hobby. And I like that these characters sweat, worry, bleed, cry, and reveal their true selves when the idea of Hell on Earth becomes very, very real.
(POSSIBLE MINOR SPOILER ALERT BELOW, READ CAUTIOUSLY)
What’s unique about Dawn of the Dead is that the part I disliked most occurred after the movie was ostensibly over. During the end credits something happens that threatens to make everything we watched pointless. It’s one thing to see bad events, it’s another to feel like having any kind of hope was foolish. A movie that was cruelly violent but in a heedless, action-packed sort of way becomes simply cruel. Although it might not be as bad as it looks; that is if you accept the logic that, if we’re watching a certain videotape, someone must have found it.