Very good remake of my all-time favorite film (***1/2)

Rating: 9/10 (28 March 2004)

There's no other way to start this review than to state that George A. Romero's original, 1978 masterpiece "Dawn Of The Dead", about 4 survivors of a zombie plague setting up house in an empty shopping mall, is my favorite movie of all time. I remember the first time I saw it like it was yesterday.

A lot of the other fans of the original were upset at the idea of this remake, but I was excited. I'm not a purist, so as long as the makers paid respect to the original and made a good-enough movie that wasn't TOO stupid, I'd be happy. Well, I couldn't be happier to tell you that unlike the lame botch-job that was the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake, this "Dawn..." remake met my expectations...and then some.
Technically, it's not being called a "remake" but rather a "re-envisioning", because the characters and sequence of events are quite different. I didn't mind this, because it's far more interesting to see a reworking of a theme than an exact remake, and there is lots of interesting ground left to cover in Romero's brilliantly imagined post-apocalyptic society.

After the unexplained plague hits and proceeds to turn all of society upside down within a matter of hours, a few survivors, which include a nurse (great indie actress Sarah Polley), a cop (Ving Rhames), and a young man (Mekhi Phifer) with his very pregnant Russian girlfriend (Inna Korobkina), head to the local mall looking for shelter.
Once they lock the entrances and it's clear that no help is coming, they proceed for a while to build a new life in the shopping mall. It's a fascinating concept, building an insulated, miniature utopian society inside this giant mall, while just outside, the whole world is crumbling.

The problem, though, is that there are far too many characters in this one. In the original, there were only four, and as a result they were each extremely well developed. Here, there's at least 15 people in the mall, and many of them seem to be just filling space.
Though it's true that Romero's smart social commentary takes a backseat here to hard-driving action scenes, this is still a very tough and intelligent film. A few other critics and I picked up on an eerie, distinctly post-9/11 vibe, the idea of living in a burned-out, post-apocalyptic America (an American flag makes an ironic appearance near the end). Hmm, maybe the zombies are George W. Bush's followers?
Ultimately, writer James Gunn and director Zack Snyder have gone out of their way to make a really fine film here, and it shows. They don't stray far from Romero's vision or dumb-down the material, they retained much of his dark humor, they assembled a quality cast, and included several clever cameos and in-jokes for those of us familiar with the original.

So it's not Romero, but it's still a hell of a good time.
And be sure not to arrive late. The first 10 minutes of this film (which includes what is bar none the best opening credits sequence I've seen in years), make for a powerful experience all their own.