This film represents a definite first: the first zombie film ever
set in Wisconsin. This is it. We’ve made it, people. Time to
open a Miller and celebrate. I think any one of us who’ve watched
Wisconsinites stagger home at bar time can find subtle irony in this
setting. So can any of us who’ve noticed the vacant stare of
a Packer fan staring at the television on a Sunday afternoon. But
I digress.
Since George Romero pretty much invented the zombie genre with “Night
of the Living Dead” there have been many zombie films unleashed
upon us. None are quite as nerve-rattling as that initial film, however,
not even Romero’s own sequel: “Dawn
of the Dead”. According to film critics everywhere, “Dawn
of the Dead” wasn’t really about the last vestiges
of humanity holed up in a shopping mall and fighting off a zombie
horde. It was actually a comment upon the retail industry and America’s
own zombified consumerist culture. Apparently. (Silly me, I thought
it was just a film about zombies.) The new “Dawn of the Dead”
doesn’t have such things in mind. Or does it? I think that enough
of Romero’s original cynicism is transplanted into this film,
intact. And I also think that there are a great many things to recommend
about this particular zombie flick, which has a few subtle jabs to
level at American consumerism as well as a few other targets. When
we see a top down shot of the Milwaukee suburbs (which looks a little
too nice to actually BE the Milwaukee suburbs), it reminds us of another
brain-dead symptom of our greedy culture: those damn houses that all
look identical built outside American cities so suburbanites can stagger
home from work and curl up with a beer far from the inherent violence
of living within the actual city. That illusion comes shattering to
pieces when the pretty suburbanite nurse living in one of these identical
homes awakens one morning to see a small child feasting on her husband’s
jugular vein right before said husband tries to devour her. Violence
has found its way out of the big city, my dear, and right into your
bedroom.
This jarring prologue is only one of the many jarring moments of
“Dawn of the Dead”, which has much better acting, much
better special effects, a polished yet unsettling look and much faster
zombies than the film it is remaking. “Dawn
of the Dead” takes the premise of the original and mines
it for all its worth, a lot more effectively than the original did.
The original explores the way the survivors all begin to turn on one
another and bicker, which is all fine and dandy, but I personally
want some gory, zombie action. Sure, the original film was definitely
gory. It was one of the few films I’ve ever seen that nearly
made me vomit (the others being “The
Exorcist” and, for other reasons, “How
the Grinch Stole Christmas”). This new version doesn’t
make my lunch do somersaults, but it did have me on the edge of my
seat for the majority of its running time, which is a feat to be commended.
The survivors do a little bickering towards the beginning (probably
to satisfy fans of the first flick) and then thankfully the film just
rushes at you full steam ahead, with a zombie threat around every
corner and enough scares to keep your heart on its toes. I can’t
remember a lot of moments that got under my skin from the original
(the only one that springs to mind is a moment where some biker zombies
are lunching on a man’s intestines) but there were several that
wormed their way under my skin from this movie. One of the most intense
of those involves a woman delivering a baby in the shopping mall while
slowly fighting a particularly nasty infection. It’s a ballsy
movie that goes to the places visited in this scene, let me tell you.
But to tell you more would spoil this movie’s gruesome fun.
If the first movie is more character-based, this one is more action
based. If the first film can bear comparisons to “Alien”
(and let’s assume that it can, why the hell not) then this one
is pure “Aliens”. “Alien” was about creepy
mood and atmosphere, whereas “Aliens” is just balls to
the wall alien ass kicking. If the original “Dawn”
was a mood piece, then this is the one where they kick some serious
zombie ass. A great portion of this film is pure adrenaline-soaked
bloodbath, and it’s all the better for it. Though the film has
some solid acting in it as well. No one is going to win an Oscar here,
but Ving Rhames exudes a quiet authority and Sarah Polley lends this
film a sense of indie class just as Alec Guinness lent a sense of
class and authority to “Star
Wars”. I don’t remember any of the characters from
the original film, but I have a feeling that the characters played
by Sarah Polley and Jake Weber especially are going to haunt me for
a while. Jake Weber is great as an everyman who finds courage in a
crisis, a man who has never been able to hold a steady job who steps
to the fore and takes charge in a crisis with a level head and a big
heart. I liked him a lot here. He made the human characters worth
rooting for. And that is really what puts this movie ahead of the
first one for me. It has a human element to counterbalance the cynicism
of the original. It has a heart to go along with the bloodshed. Mekhi
Pfiffer’s love for his “family” is a lot more disturbing
and yet human than anything I can recall from the Romero version.
Not that any of this is hardly fair, mind you. Romero was operating
on a shoestring budget whereas the director of this new one has untold
millions at his disposal. (And the director, Zack Snyder, has done
a fine job, by the way. He may have directed only commercials and
music videos prior to this gig, but he more than ably asserts himself
here.) But Snyder still outdoes the Romero version where it counts:
in the human department.
The film is far from flawless, however. Many of the characters in
the early scenes are done in strokes that are a bit too broad and
some of the humor is a bit out of place. And the film also has one
of those dumbfuck women who risks her life and the lives of everyone
else to save a fucking dog. (My God, are there actually people who
would be that stupid?) But no matter. The film still has more than
enough good things going for it, and the final conflict between the
humans and the undead is a doozy. “Dawn of the Dead” ain’t
perfection, but it’s a hell of a lot closer than I expected
it to be, with enough well done elements to make it worth recommending.
Plus, I like the fast zombies better than the more traditional, slow
moving zombies. I mean, which would be scarier coming after you? A
zombie that moves with all the determination of a sleepwalking sloth
or one running flat out directly at you with no hint of humanity in
its soulless eyes? See, that’s what I thought.
