Movie Review: Dawn of the Dead Remake

Tonight's Episode:
Do we really need to keep remaking movies?

Or

Do zombies really need to run?

Well folks it's that time again, that's right, zombie time, BREAK IT DOWN!! More appropriately it's that time when the waking giant that is the Summer Movie Blockbuster Season is starting to get gassy right before it really wakes up. The flatus that has happened to fly out this time is a little bit of celluloid called Dawn of the Dead.

Dawn of the Dead is a remake of a 1978 film of the same name directed by George Romero. The original is one of the few things out of the seventies that actually did some good for society, the underlying discourse of the film is its commentary on the rampant, mindless consumerism of the seventies. This is expressed in the tale of a bedraggled group of survivors as they set up shop in an abandoned shopping mall to escape the flood of dead taking over the world. This brings up the question of who the real zombies are, the dead guys or the ones who make their lives the things they buy.

I love the original Dawn of the Dead, it is one of the best films ever made. I also love any zombie movie in general, but that's only because of the barely contained rage I have for society and everything it does wrong… Anyway, I love me some zombie movies.

One would think that I would be apprehensive about this film being remade, and I was, but I was willing to give it a chance, after all this would bring the original to the eyes of people who may not have seen it yet, and hey knowledge of this film is a good thing. I was willing to give it a chance.

The new film starts with Anna (Sarah Polley) overworked at her job in a hospital as hints of the zombie epidemic are slowly starting to come in. Once she gets home she is rather unaware of the outside events until the next morning. In the morning a neighbor girl, already dead, comes in and tears out Anna's husband's throat. When she escapes we see that the world has gone straight to hell. She then meets up with Kenneth (Ving Rhames), Michael (Jake Weber), Andre (Mekhi Phifer), and Luda (She's new and Russian). With no other way to get to the nearby military base for shelter Michael has the plan to get inside the mall and hide out.

The rest of the film follows the original somewhat and updates it with a choppy plot and muddled character sketches to its own confused gory end. Really I don't like telling people to not see a movie, and like most other adaptations my artistic sensibility feels completely raped by the movie industry for what they did to this film.

Truthfully, aside from my own biases towards this film, it's ok. I wouldn't recommend it because even on it's own it's really not that good. The dialogue is hammy in parts, and there are some massive stretches of your suspension of disbelief, and the movie clocks in at an hour and forty minutes so you can already tell the director did the bare minimum needed to get it made.

I can still say that there were parts that I enjoyed, there were some actual genuine moments in the film that gave it life and a sense of being cohesive. Ving Rhames playing chess with another stranded survivor a block away with the use of dry erase boards and binoculars is a really great moment in the film.

The main problems for the film are the running time, and too many characters on the screen. By the halfway point in the film the first set of characters gets eight more thrown in with them, compare that to the total of five characters in the first film. There is just one point I need to get to before I finish my point about the characters.

I knew that the film was going to be a pile when I saw Mekhi Phifer's interview on The Today Show. He said that this update was better than the original because there is more gore, it is character driven, and it has dropped all pretenses. Well, I'm sorry Mekhi, but just because there was once a decent horror film that commented on society and actually adding some credibility to the horror genre doesn't make it pretentious. Man, there are just those times when you listen to guys like this and you want to make it a law that actors shouldn't be allowed to talk when they're trying to sound all witty and smart. It just makes me hate actors. Then again I would hope that people will listen to this guy, see the kind of movies he's in and then realize just what caliber film actor he is, which is somewhere around trained dog level. (Disclaimer: I meant no offense to any trained dogs that I may have offended, as almost all of you can out act Mekhi Phifer.)

Anyway, he's a moron, and there are too many characters in the remake. This is a problem because as the movie progressed about two-thirds of these new characters vanished from the screen. At one point there's a montage of ten second clips to remind you where the rest of them are. This new film is also not character driven because you don't get to know even the main characters beyond the one-dimension characters you are given. This, of course, is a shame because there were some interesting characters somewhere in the muddled screenplay.

I do have to admit that if you do see it for one reason, see it for Sarah Polley, she really shines here, and that's due to how good of an actress she is. Then again this could be from the crush that I have on her, ever since I first saw her back in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen back in 1988. Back off fanboys and Canucks, she's mine, or maybe her husband's. Ving Rhames did a good job too, but that's because he's above average also.

When I saw the sneak peak of the first ten minutes on USA Network I saw that the film was done by a new production company and written and directed by relative unknowns. As I am currently checking out IMDB, I see just how horrible a mistake this was. Zack Snyder, who directed, this is his actual first film, he has nothing else under his belt, and that's distressing. James Gunn, who scripted this "film," do you really want to know what he's done before this? All right, you asked for it. Troma films and the two Scooby-Doo movies. (Writer's note: I do now have to amend my comments about James Gunn. I gave him an unfair shake in this review. I am retracting my comments now because I realize that the fault should lie solely on the director. James Gunn knows how to write a script and direct a movie so the only possible explanation for this movie is the director ruined it. If you care to see a well done horror film see "Slither" when it comes out on DVD.)

Certainly I'll give him credit for the Troma films, they do some crappy horror films, and that's a good thing sometimes. Though in return he gets no accolades for the Scooby-Doo films and Dawn of the Dead. I think Gunn is also too green to understand just what Romero did with his film and then on top of it Gunn couldn't appreciate the message because he turned Dawn of the Dead into what it warned and scolded society for. As long as I am mentioning actor quotes about the film I may as well go with one more. Polley's statement about the film is that it's just going to be another zombie movie, and she's right, there is no message, though the script tries to toy with ideas from time to time, but it just drops them for more gore, and now that I realize it Troma-like situations. Of course the big improvement over the original is that the zombies in this one run, that's right they run, so that automatically makes it far superior to the original.

What I did notice though is that a lot of this film took small stylistic cues right from 28 Days Later, which if you are in the mood for a contemporary zombie film is the one that you should see.

If you want to see some gore, some shooting, little character examination, and some really cute chicks go see Dawn of the Dead. However, if you want to see a thought provoking film that discusses matters of human nature, analyzes society, and has characters and plot that you would actually care about go rent Dawn of the Dead. Almost forgot, that old one also has a bunch of gore too. As the Summer Movie Blockbuster Season looms ever closer be sure to watch out for more gassy emanations that just may come your way.