Brain Dead

Rating: Null/10 (17 May 2011)

"I was trying to come up with a concept about a new society, revolutionary...in political terms, that's taking over and devouring the old society." – George A. Romero
In the lead up to and wake of the September 11th attacks, Hollywood saw a resurgence in films featuring anti-Arabic and anti-Persian sentiments. Most of these films unconsciously pandered to nationalist fears, and featured aliens, monsters or creatures shooting down buildings or zapping screaming Americans.
Zack Snyder's "Dawn of the Dead", a remake of a 1978 George Romero's horror classic by the same name, finds a group of Americans holed up in a shopping mall whilst bloodthirsty zombies roam outside. Beginning with unconscionable, near subliminal shots of Muslims praying in unison, the film quickly becomes one big anti-Islamic blood orgy, the film ascribing to the zombies the "evil madness" of jihadists.
These new, post 9/11 zombies are not the placid, stumbling fools of Romero's "living dead" series, but an angry, enraged, wrathful mob, who exist not to consume, but to transform, pollute and convert others. Significantly, the mob starts by infecting children, converting the family unit before spreading further outwards. This modern zombie doesn't only expresses Western fears of violent "Islamic" (and soon, "Confucian") oppositions to modernity and secularism, but Western understandings of the "Islamic agenda", namely the Muslim exists only to breed, emigrate, infect and submit the world to some wild, archaic version of Sharia Law.
This reverses Romero's attitude to zombies. Throughout Romero's films – and this is why thrill seeking audiences increasingly abandoned him – the zombie is not a relentless bogeyman, but a symbol for cultural or revolutionary shifts which usurp and devour previously entrenched, old societies. Think the tall, black Zombie leader whose proletariat uprising overthrows a George Bush styled warmonger in "Land of the Dead", toppling his unjust empire. "Night of The Living Dead" likewise saw "the zombie" as being symbolic of various mid-60s uprisings against tyrannical paternal and political despots. In later Romero films, the zombies innocuously represent a culture of tech savvy, media proficient whizkids; a digital mob which clumsily replaces an outmoded analogue generation and its assorted cultural and familial values. From here on, Romero's zombies become resolutely postmodern. Neutered, without purpose and ineffectual, they are like so much digital noise, born to proliferate with record buttons, youtube accounts and cell phone cameras.
So unlike other horror directors, Romero doesn't see the "zombie" as a monster. Instead he treats them with a much more objective tone, dispassionately watching as they change from radicals, to consumerists to angry abolishers of bourgeois property. In his last two films, the concept of the "zombie" changes further. In a stagnated society in which progress seems impossible, the zombie becomes a fantasy concocted by backward looking survivalists; a pipe-dream in which those remaining few outside the network society dream up half thought out zombie uprisings and apocalyptic purges. In this way, Romero's "Survival of the Dead" anticipates (and critiques) the new generation of zombie rip offs artists like Zack Snyder, and the countless kill-a-zombie video games flooding the shelves. The idea of the zombie has been killed, and so now we repeatedly resurrect (and slaughter) zombies only to preserve the illusion that the revolution is not dead.
What Romero recognises is the inherent deadendedness of the postmodern condition. The present age is the age of advertisement, the age of miscellaneous announcements: nothing happens, but what does happen is instant notification. A (zombie) uprising in the present age, an age of worldly renunciation, is the most unthinkable of all; such a show of energy would strike the calculating sensibleness of the age as ludicrous. And so while Romero's films go into increasingly dour territory, material like Snyder's "Dawn", "Zombieland", "Shaun of the Dead", "28 Days Later", "The Walking Dead", "Carriers" etc engage in cosy, survivalist fantasies.
If Snyder's film is inferior to Romero's in every way – Romero's was consistently snappy, shocking, funny, nauseating, pacey, imaginative, tense – it nevertheless contains a very good first act sequence rife with cool vehicle camera mounts and smooth, helicopter shots. The rest of the film hinges on trite twists on Romero's classic: instead of the mall being a place of refuge, our heroes are for a long while barred from the mall. Instead of our heroes being cool survivalists, they're criminals, tired hospital workers and morose security guards. Instead of a truck load of military men assaulting the mall, we have a bus load of gay priests, selfish men, obese women and whores. The implication here is that America is already messed up, overworked, degenerate, immoral, poor, marginalised, disenfranchised and has long been financially exploited, her citizens barred from the pleasures of the shopping mall. In this world, the fanatical zombie purge is almost deserved.
6/10 – Aside from the first 20 minutes, this is a dull, unimaginative, predictable, and poorly shot film. Snyder's cast is mostly terrible, except for Sarah Polley, an actress who consistently turns in good performances and who has made a career out of elevating independent films. See Romero's original film instead. Worth one viewing.