Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Dawn of the Dead, 2004. Directed by Zack Snyder. Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer, Ty Burrell.

Given that the new remake of Dawn of the Dead was written by the guy who wrote both Tromeo and Juliet AND the Scooby Doo movies, my expectations for the movie had been revised downward sometime ago. Couple this with the taste of bile left in my mouth after the LAST big remake of a classic horror movie (at the time, I mentioned to friends that the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre might have been the worst piece of shit that I’ve ever seen, though, in retrospect, it hurt slightly less than the remake of The Haunting...) and you have what can charitably be described as "diminished expectations."

So I went to the movie theater thinking...well, I don’t rightly remember what I was thinking.

Most of the negative thoughts I brought with me were obliterated by the use of Johnny Cash’s "The Man Comes Around" over the opening credits--a better mating of music to subject matter I have never seen before in a horror movie--and by the fact that the opening credits follow on the heels of a pitch-perfect opening salvo that puts us in the midst of the apocalypse. One wishes that the filmmakers had maintained the fever pitch of the opening, but I suppose it’s understandable that they didn’t. Regrettable, but understandable.

If you are familiar with the plot of the original, then you know the plot of the remake: zombies are a plague upon the land and the survivors of the zombie apocalypse are holed up in a mall. There are more characters in the remake, and a shorter running time, so the development of the characters we have isn’t as in-depth as in the original. The actors in the remake are greatly superior, so it’s a trade off, I guess. Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames head the cast and give the film a gravitas that might elude a film cast with the latest "hot" actors from the WB. Contrary to what you might have read elsewhere, the social commentary is not absent from the movie. The film begins with an overflight of a faceless suburb, an architectural graveyard so to speak, and the central area of the mall where our heroes gather is the "Hallowed Grounds" coffee shop. We also get a superb "die yuppie scum" moment late in the movie, carefully orchestrated from what has gone before. Romero himself authored a number of variations on motherhood in the first two Dead movies, but he never quite got around a situation like the one in this movie; perhaps it takes a screen writer with no shame whatsoever to author such a situation and carry it to its logical conclusion and good taste be damned. Hell, scenarist James Gunn used to work for Troma, so you KNOW he doesn’t have any shame. I loved the guy on the roof of the gun store and the chainsaw and the cameos by the cast members from the original. But the thing I REALLY love about this movie is the feeling that we are actually watching the apocalypse unfold before our very eyes. In this regard, the film is very much of its time. The burning buildings on the skyline have an uncomfortable similarity to the World Trade towers and the Federal building in Oklahoma City. Law enforcement has collapsed. The world is spinning well and truly into the abyss. The filmmakers also do something with this material that even George Romero omitted: they show us the world before the fall. We see Sarah Polley’s character in her mundane life before the zombies come, and that contrast with the world after everything unravels is a potent thing.

Like I said, I didn’t know what to expect from this movie, but a movie that may even be the equal of its source material certainly wasn’t anywhere in my expectations, diminished or otherwise....