ugh

Rating: 1/10 (4 July 2012)

Somehow or another, when every other 2000-something remake of an old horror movie set off most horror purists' "Hollywood BS" alarms, this one managed to sneak under them. The irony is that this might be the worst of the lot, as well as the most insulting considering the original's incisive anti-consumerism subtext.
Zack Snyder's directing style is everything soulless, overproduced and superficial about Hollywood regurgitated and dumbed down 10 times over, left in the freezer for a year and microwaved. Who needs grisly and grainy when everything can be shot super-clean and "sexy" like an MTV music video? Ah, the art of missing the point.
The running zombies are stupid. I don't care about or want realism in my walking corpse movies, but turning zombies into athletic killers affects something fundamental: fear. With slow but savage, drone-like enemies, you get a sense of hope, and your mind starts mapping things out. Conversely, when everything starts falling apart, there's genuine panic, balanced and exacerbated by a faint possibility of survival. When the characters are surrounded by a thousand leopard-fast killing machines, there is no hope, so you don't care what happens, thus, there is no fear.
More importantly, though, the characters are cardboard cutouts. To top it off, when the movie ends and the credits roll, we get nu-metal. The cycle of 13 year old appeal is complete.
Horrible.