A Stylish Remake that Strays from the Understated Beauty of the Original

Rating: Null/10 (21 March 2004)

Let me preface this by saying I am a HUGE fan of the original Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. I think Romero is a genius and his movies are really smart. The original Dawn of the Dead is a really sharp social commentary disguised as a basic horror movie. It takes on issues about interracial relationships, class, American nationalism, the role of the media, and most of all the original film is a HUGE critique of glossy, homogenized, consumerism.
The new Dawn of the Dead is... a glossy, homogenized, consumerist movie! Yeah. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Romero! Just about everything that made the original so sharp and biting is gone. This movie really shares very little with the original except the general premise, a few scenes, and maybe 3 lines of dialogue. So I was disappointed. I think if you've never seen the original, you might enjoy this because it is, like I said, a pretty glossy and well-made horror film.
The good: This film sets the scene probably better than any other horror film I can think of off the top of my head. I really likes the way the film established the premise so quickly, it grabbed you before you had a chance to get your guard up. I only wish it was the establishment of some OTHER movie other than a second-rate remake of one of my favorites. The acting was fine although nobody had much material to work with. Ving Rhames as the macho-military-guy character was a brilliant stoke of casting. Effects are appropriately slick and animated. I missed the neon blood of the original, but there was more than enough reddish blood to go around.

The bad: This movie takes very little from the original. What it takes, it re-envisions very poorly. Many of the scenes are in different order, so they're sort of disjointed and confusing. The mall is severely underutilized. This film could have happened anywhere, the mall is merely incidental-whereas it was the central heart of the original. My real problem is that the scenes from the original Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead resonate so STRONGLY that to re-make them in a different way is really hard for me to swallow.
Fast zombies. Super fast zombies. Superhuman zombies. Which is all well and good, who am I to tell zombies what they can't and can't do. The problem? I think the Romero's slow moving zombies are scarier. Sure, you can outrun them and dispatch of them individually really easily. But that's not what's scary about zombies. What's scary about zombies is that they multiply, and multiply, and MULTIPLY. and the combined strength of thousands upon thousands of slow movie zombies is that they're everywhere. It's suffocating. They take over, They're methodical. They slowly but surely get you. And THAT, is suspense. Fast movie zombies, in my opinion, removes what makes zombies special. If they're fast, they might as well be vampires-right? It's the slowness that makes zombies different.

Maybe it's just me, but I found this movie to really cop out on the whole interracial relationship angle. They don't allow Ving Rhames and Sarah Polley any sexual tension. Instead, almost as a throwback they give us a different interracial couple (who we all know are zombie meat anyway) rather than explore the issue through the main characters. That's such a cop out.

In the end, this is a fast-paced, well shot horror film with nice effects. It's not the biting social commentary Romero's classic is. Pun intended.