Interesting cultural artifact.

Rating: 5/10 (18 March 2007)

Just about every film has its good and bad points. This is the first one I can recall that lines them up in such a way that we start with the best and then decline inexorably to the worst. The opening is simply brilliant in concept and execution. The depiction of the world coming, to all intents and purposes, to an end while people go about their daily lives, the lack of explanation, and the depictions of wildly accelerating chaos to the tune of Johnny Cash's cunningly chosen "When the man comes around" are inspired. The characters behave sufficiently believably that the situation itself becomes real. About ten minutes in things are looking good - and then the problems set in. The choice of having the zombies be fast and rabid instead of lumbering makes them scarier and far more formidable antagonists and it taps in to the current fear of pandemics adding an edge of realism to the terror. The problem is that it makes the choice of a shopping mall as a suitable fortress even more unlikely than in the original. The idea these zombies would be unable to break right in doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It also makes it impossible to recreate the satire of consumerism that drove Romero to choose the mall as the setting for his 1978 film. No zombies wandering around the stores here. What we're left with is the "small band of heroes battling monstrous horde" template that fits equally well over, Aliens, Starship Troopers, Eight Legged Freaks - the list goes on, and it's not enough to sustain interest. The gore lacks the leering voyeurism of Romero's collaborations with Tom Savini (who, perhaps inevitably, has a cameo as a Sheriff) but, even if director Zack Snyder doesn't linger on it it's strong enough. The laboriously set up "chainsaw accident" is gratuitous and silly. The rest just becomes tiresome out of sheer repetition. If you can, skip the end credit sequence. Utterly pointless nudity and despair are tacked on for no better reason than "because we could". Just as "Underworld: Evolution" marked the sorry point at which we sank from films as two hour music videos to films as two hour video games there has to be some wretched significance in going from re-makes and sequels to re-makes OF sequels. Viewed in isolation this isn't an awful film it just constitutes further evidence that, as a culture, we're pretty much terminally out of ideas.