Overall Rating
  Awesome: 27.37%
Worth A Look: 49.16%
Average: 9.5%
Pretty Bad: 6.15%
Total Crap: 7.82%
15 reviews, 89 user ratings
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| Land of the Dead |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Romero is back with a vengeance."
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The key to George A. Romero's Dead films is that, movie by movie, the flesh-eating zombies become more and more sympathetic -- animalistic, but pure and sincere, compared with corrupt human survivors -- until, in the fourth entry 'Land of the Dead,' they emerge as something like heroes.Breathes there a moviegoer with soul so dead who won't cheer on the zombies as they tuck into a refreshing midnight snack of rich people? Romero has always used his zombie films as vehicles for social commentary, and here, several years after the dead began to rise and eat the living, the city is separated into two segments: those who are wealthy and white enough to afford a safe skyscraper existence far away from the moaning undead; and everyone else. What's more, the zombies have grown tired of being used for target practice. Through instinct, or perhaps through trial and error, they have begun to learn.
For many horror fans, Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979) are the gold standard of independently financed fearmaking. His Day of the Dead (1985) was by necessity truncated -- Romero simply didn't have the budget to realize his initial concept -- and it was a bitter and frustrated movie, yet still offered some pleasures. Two decades have passed since Romero has put a zombie in front of a camera, and the danger is that some fans will bring to Land of the Dead twenty years of anticipation, dreams of the epic Romero should have been free to make for all these years in limbo. Forget all that. The film cannot and will not meet such expectations; no film could. What it does, and does tightly and with a finely wrought sense of purpose I haven't seen from Romero in a very long while, is to tell a ripping good zombie yarn.
The hero, of a sort, is Riley (Simon Baker), a weary veteran of warfare with the "stenches." He has built an impenetrable transport rig called Dead Reckoning, and in it he and his men travel to hot spots in the zombie-laden areas of the city, scavenging for supplies. (This saga may have begun in 1968 in our time, but in the movies' timeline we're probably only talking about a span of a few years, which would explain why there are still places that can be scavenged from.) One of Riley's men, Cholo (John Leguizamo), has other ideas; his scheme is to hijack Dead Reckoning and threaten to blow up the rich-people sector of Fiddler's Green unless the boss of everything, Mr. Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), gives Cholo a large amount of money. Meanwhile, a band of zombies, gradually growing in number, line up behind a vengeful zombie (Eugene Clark) who, like "Bub" in Day of the Dead, is a rather quick study.
The movie is fast but never rushed; with a master's control, Romero sets his characters in motion and against each other. Special-effects guru Tom Savini isn't in charge of the gore this time (he does reprise his role from Dawn, though, a brutal machete-wielding biker now turned shambling zombie), but Savini's loss is Greg Nicotero's gain; Nicotero's zombie make-up is, dare I say, subtly crafted, and the splattery bits are suggested more often than shown, just as in Night of the Living Dead. I'd also say that, with a cast including Asia Argento as an ex-hooker Riley rescues and Robert Joy as a sort of Lennie to Riley's George, not to mention dependable veterans Leguizamo and Hopper, Land of the Dead boasts the best acting since Night. The movie successfully brings this series full circle, or perhaps begins (dare we hope?) another trilogy. Hey, if George Lucas could do it, why not this much more visionary George?
Land of the Dead quieted my misgivings early on, when we see zombies chained up for cheap entertainment at some punk-goth dive frequented by the scummy dilettantes of the city. You ache for one of those poor zombies to break loose and gnaw some meat, and soon enough they do. In the Dead films, Romero shows us humanity at its most callous, against which the guileless hunger of the zombies seems innocent. Supposedly soulless, the flesh-eaters have more soul than those trying to eradicate them.Romero understands his genre from top to bottom: The subject is not humans but monsters, and how they reflect each other, and how, as Nietzsche put it, humanity consists mainly of battling monsters without becoming one. It's a message that has been uniquely relevant in every decade Romero has advanced it, and it is ultra-relevant now.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=12288&reviewer=416
originally posted: 01/03/07 08:18:37
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 CineVegas Film Festival For more in the 2005 CineVegas Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Edinburgh Film Festival. For more in the 2005 Edinburgh Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
24-Jun-2005 (R)
DVD: 18-Oct-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
04-Aug-2005
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