Overall Rating
  Awesome: 41.92%
Worth A Look: 21.99%
Average: 16.15%
Pretty Bad: 9.62%
Total Crap: 10.31%
16 reviews, 195 user ratings
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| Dawn of the Dead (2004) |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Not terrible, but...why?"
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Of the recent spate of unnecessary remakes of horror classics (2003's 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' being the nadir), the new "re-imagining" of George A. Romero's 1979 'Dawn of the Dead' is probably the least shabby.For some of the running time, I agreed to accept it as a variant tale following survivors at another mall at the same time as the events in Romero's film. But this remake, directed without much personality by first-timer Zack Snyder, cannot come anywhere near Romero's achievement -- which was not only a satire of consumerism, but also a snapshot of an exhausted, demoralized American period. As the Romero film opens, the flesh-eating zombies have been rampaging for a good long while (it was, after all, a continuation of Romero's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead); the lead characters have been dealing with the aftermath, on the front line of the action, so we understood why their instinct was to move to the relatively quiet confines of a shopping mall.
The new film opens with a glimpse of normality, only to be shattered when people start dying and coming back to life. The pre-credits sequence, which follows young nurse Sarah Polley as she frantically negotiates her way through a neighborhood gone mad, does capture what it might be like to go to sleep in ignorant bliss and wake up to a world in which everything has gone to hell. It packs an eerie post-9/11 frisson. From there, though, as Polley meets a few other survivors (Ving Rhames, Mekhi Phifer, Jake Weber) and they head to a local mall, this Dawn of the Dead becomes an enclosed Assault on Precinct 13 clone without much resonance or point. Screenwriter James Gunn keeps piling on new characters, none of whom (including a dog) makes much of an impression.
Never mind that recently deceased people shouldn't be able to run (this aspect seems stolen wholesale from last summer's 28 Days Later, in which the villains weren't technically zombies anyway); never mind the baggage we bring to a film bearing the title Dawn of the Dead. In and of itself, the movie becomes repetitive, a one-note affair searching for a second note, sometimes finding one but then losing track of it. The survivors hole up, fending off zombies while attending to conflicts and crises (a trio of armed, cretinous security guards; a pregnant woman). In a rare affecting moment, a cadaverous-looking Matt Frewer turns up as a bitten and infected man who knows he has to be killed; an interesting subplot left out to dry involves a man on the roof of a neighboring building, who picks off zombies and communicates with the survivors via dry-wipe message boards.
Eventually, Dawn '04 devolves into zombie-attack scenes; some get shot in the head, some don't, and it's all filmed in the same headache-inducing step-printing/undercranking style Danny Boyle used for 28 Days Later, with lots of jerky, unscannable movement. The movie drags out two original Dawn stars, Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger, as well as original Dawn make-up artist Tom Savini, for obligatory nothing cameos, though Foree does get to intone, once again, the famous "When there's no more room in hell" line. Dawn '04 is commendable in a couple of areas; Jake Weber makes a bright, shrewd protagonist with an undercurrent of ruthlessness -- a credible survivor type. And if you stay through the end credits you'll get grainy video footage more chilling than just about anything in the movie itself (aided considerably by Kyle Cooper's splatterpunk credits design).
I'm willing to believe that this Dawn was made by fans of the original, who got control of the project (which was going to be made anyway) and tried to stay true to it while creating something new. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for those who feared a true desecration of Romero's masterwork, this is only a moderately competent zombie flick. If it generates interest in Romero's film, so much the better, but it's sad to imagine that newcomers to the Dead films will see the remake first and consider it the definitive version.Despite the remake's box-office success and unaccountable critical support, though, I have faith that Romero's film will outlive its own rehash. It's essentially the difference between a classic driven by vision and a copy driven by dollar signs.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8887&reviewer=416
originally posted: 01/02/07 16:43:38
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 ScreamFest L.A. Horror Festival. For more in the 2004 ScreamFest L.A. series, click here.
Horror Remakes: For more in the Horror Remakes series, click here.
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USA
19-Mar-2004 (R)
DVD: 26-Oct-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
10-Jun-2004
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