Mediocre

Rating: 5/10 (10 September 2008)

OK, so the 2004 Zack Snyder remake of George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead is better than his own fourth Dead movie, Land Of The Dead, but it's still not nearly as good as the original 1978 Dawn Of The Dead. The basic problem is that the film violates its own universe's rules so many times that the film falls apart narratively. One can get away with things that are illogical in real life, but not according to the film's own precepts. In contrast to the Romero canon, zombies in this film can run like Olympic sprinters. Why? No reason except the financial success of the British zombie film 28 Days. Also, in the Romero canon, anyone who dies becomes a zombie, whereas in this film you are zombified only by a bite. Yet, if so, how did the first zombie, Zombie Zero, come to be?
That said, this film is not bad, merely a solid action/horror flick that follows the same general pattern as the original Dawn Of The Dead, except that instead of four survivors in a mall there are a dozen or so. Illogic rules, as in all horror and sci fi films, and the plot is propelled by the characters doing the dumbest things possible, such as the climactic scene where they make a dash from the mall to a marina to head for an island they think will be safe haven. For fans of the Romero canons there are a few cool cameos by Tom Savini (Romero's original makeup man), and Scott Reiniger and Ken Foree, from the original Dawn Of The Dead, with Reiniger as a military man interviewed on television, and Foree as a televangelist repeating his famed declamation from the original, 'When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.' This, and a bevy of other little 'moments', is enough for me to recommend the film as a solid reinterpretation of the superior original, despite its reliance on the 'humans are their own worst enemies' mantra, although the DVD features make this a much stronger recommendation for those zombiephiles out there.