Pointless (spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (29 April 2004)

The history of cinema is littered with missed opportunities. A great idea is let down by too small a budget. A literate script is rewritten for popcorn-swilling idiots. A poor cast wastes its good dialogue. With an endless supply of films crying out for a second chance it's frustrating that Hollywood is determined to only remake its successes. They may talk about retelling a story for a new generation, but cinema is eternal and its stories are forever available to every generation, so we know they're only interested in remaking the original film's money.
Here we have Dawn of the Dead, an entirely pointless remake of a film regarded as a genre classic. As the dead rise and develop a taste for scrummy live flesh, nondescript humans with as much character as the gormless corpses take shelter in a shopping mall. Here they fend off fatal attacks of the munchies and take a few swipes at our culture of consumerism. At least, they did in the original. In the remake they hang out at a coffee place and chat.
There is a staggering lack of atmosphere. Here we find ourselves surrounded by death, by walking corpses wanting to tear us apart, and there is no tension, no eeriness, no suspense. If it weren't for the gallons of blood you'd have no idea you were watching a horror film at all. Shot as an action movie, played as if you adjust to a plague of zombies after ten minutes, it's astounding that a film with this much gore and this strong an idea can be so dull.
Its characters are three-dimensional, realistic and well rounded in some kind of mirror universe where hot snow falls up. In ours they're pitifully underwritten. One guy is Surly, one is Sarcastic, one is Pretty Decent. The others are Nothing At All. They apparently have names. Mekhi Phifer, a natural charmer and one of the few good points of ER's shark-jumping later seasons, is wasted here in a nothing role and a silly and predictable subplot. Character development only comes in the form of montage. I slipped out of the cinema to the bathroom, and when I came back the mean guy was nice and most of the cast had paired off! The idea that we're supposed to care about these nobodies, hope they don't get munched on and make it to the end credits alive is ridiculous. It's like trying to be emotionally attached to a chair or a bucket.
The original film had a degree of intelligence not often found in horror films, and it's certainly nowhere to be found in its remake. The shots of zombies stumbling around a shopping mall while muzak and taped announcements play unheard were priceless. The lead characters' gluttony and gradual loss of interest in living a meaningful life in place of their consumer paradise was an interesting (if over-praised) point. In this remake the satire is lost. Of course it's lost. The mall is just a location, a background on which blood will splatter, and your brain won't have to worry about thinking anything beyond `That looks cool.' There might be an attempt at satire in the brief scene where a security guard gormlessly plonks himself down in front of a TV instead of taking care of the zombie problem, but if that makes any point at all it was probably just an accident. The film's irrelevance and poor sense of social commentary is further exposed when you realise that a mysterious virus is killing people all over the country - possibly all over the world - and the word `terrorism' isn't spoken once, even to dismiss the idea. In The Day the Earth Stood Still there is a conversation where an American family wonder if the little green men are actually big, Red and earthbound. It's a throwaway moment that points to the paranoia of the time. No such intelligence here.
The only areas in which the remake surpasses the original are the visual effects and the zombies themselves. Here they are animalistic, predatory, consistent in their strength and speed, and actually able to run. These changes make for more formidable opponents, but the increased threat is not matched by increased tension. And it's strange that, despite Mr Computer giving us shots of cities on fire and thousands of zombies lining the streets, there is a lesser sense of apocalypse than in the small-scale original.
This isn't a film that needed to be made. It adds precisely nothing to the legacy of the franchise. It won't be remembered. The history of cinema will be no richer for it. And meanwhile more opportunities are being missed. More good ideas are being cut by a low budget, more scripts are being dumbed-down, more dialogue is being wasted, and no second chance will come for these films because remaking them won't guarantee a good opening weekend.