One sunny day, when I was about eleven, my friends and I were sitting in the cafeteria having our typical profanity-laden daily discussion about video games, action movies, female anatomy and other such boyish topics. Eric, the most mature and least parentally-monitored of our group, exuberantly explained a film he'd just seen about a small group of people who survived a world-wide outbreak of "zombie-ism" and retreated into a huge suburban shopping mall, converting it into a final bastion of safety and using all of the goods within it for free. "Good lord," I thought, my pre-adolescent head swimming. "That is the single-most brilliant idea for a movie...ever!"
Director George Romero's 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead was the follow-up to his original Night of the Living Dead, and is thought to have been the pinnacle of zombie-horror cinema. The country has been completely overrun by the undead, who crave living flesh for food. The government has declared a state of martial law and have sent National Guard units to exterminate the various nests of zombies that have popped up. Two officers, Peter and Roger, are sent to Pittsburgh to exterminate one such nest, but are driven back to Harrisburg, and eventually to a huge shopping mall, where they try to form a stronghold .
Certain my mother wouldn't permit me to see such a film at only eleven, I went over to Eric's where we had a screening of his brother's VHS copy of the film. The two hours that followed contained all the exploding heads and torn-apart bikers a young boy could ever desire...and more. We were freaked out and disturbed. The movie has a special place in my heart.
So, needless to say, when I caught wind of the modern remake of the film that just came out, I became excited and nervous. Would they ruin a film I'm so emotionally invested in? Or would they improve it? Well, after seeing it, I must say: "Both."
The film itself is not so much a remake as it is a second film with a mall, survivors and zombies, and the title Dawn of the Dead. The plot is new, concerning a nurse whose husband gets his neck ripped out in the first five minutes of the movie. She races away from him in her car but ends up slamming it into a tree, meeting up with a large-and-in-charge police officer, a black man with a pregnant Russian wife, and a poorly-developed new love interest. They eventually make their way to the glorious mall, where they're treated briefly like prisoners by a redneck security guard. Stuff goes wrong, zombies show up, chaos ensues, you get the picture.
Now for the bad stuff. First and foremost, gone are the satirical undertones of George A. Romero's original (which I didn't quite pick up at eleven), making way for flashier cinematography, zombies that run (ripping off the excellent "28 Days Later"), and more realistic, albeit slightly less explicit violence. Quite simply, it's a case of style over substance. Also, to use the universal movie critic's complaints, the characters are underdeveloped and the plot is thin. The original had only about half as many main characters as the remake, which helped with feelings of isolation and suspense, and left more room for the aforementioned character development. Overall, it's not that great a film, and the absence of bikers throwing pies in the faces of lumbering zombies is nearly unforgivable.
That's not to say it's completely without its positive elements though. True, the grainy cinematography during the film's finale is a bit too similar to that of 28 Days Later, but it is decidedly more interesting than that of the old film --it's just not original. The film is at least somewhat entertaining; genuinely amusing moments of dark humor, an errant chainsaw, and the most obnoxious actress in the film all made my night.
