In my opinion not as good as the '78 original, nowhere near.

Rating: 6/10 (29 January 2007)

Dawn of the Dead starts just like any other ordinary day for nurse Ana (Sarah Polley) as she goes home after another long shift, she & her husband Luis (Justin Louis) go to bed & have a good nights sleep. The next morning Luis is woken by Vivian (Hannah Lochner), their next door neighbours young girl, who proceeds to bite Luis on the neck. Ana manages to push Vivian out of the room & locks the door, Luis dies in front of her but suddenly comes back to life & attacks Ana in the same frenzied way Vivian attacked him. Ana climbs out of the bathroom window & sees complete pandemonium outside as the dead are returning to life & attacking the living, Ana gets into her car & speeds off but ends up crashing. She is found by a cop named Kenneth (Ving Rhames) who in turn find a guy named Michael (Jake Weber) along with Andre (Mekhi Phifer) & his pregnant wife Luda (Inna Korobkina) who all decide to head to the local shopping mall to find safety. They break in & watch in horror as the streets outside become overrun by flesh eating zombies while the TV news broadcasts offer little hope, if any...
Directed by first timer Zack Snyder Dawn of the Dead was apparently described as a 'reimagining' of George A. Romero's utterly brilliant Dawn of the Dead (1978) which itself was a sequel to his groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead (1968) which already has already been remade so I guess Dawn of the Dead was next in line & I personally think the result is less than inspiring. There are two versions available, the theatrical cut & a longer director's cut, unfortunately I watched the shorter theatrical version because that's the one they showed on TV even though I have the director's cut on DVD but just hadn't got round to watching it before it aired on TV, I wish I had because I don't really feel like watching it again despite the promise of some extra gore but I suppose that's irrelevant... The script by James Gunn is actually quite different from the original except the title & the fact that some of it is set in a shopping mall, I think that almost everything that made the '78 original so brilliant is lost or diluted here. The start of the film is completely different & in my opinion the best part of this 'reimagining' as it's rather effective & well built up, once the film gets to the mall not that much actually happens to be honest as straight away it's empty with only two zombies inside, there's no running around shooting zombies, there's no hiding out, there's no locking or blocking the doors off, there's no raid by the bikers & it all seems rather stale, static & predictable. Then there's the character's, there's just too many of them & there's no real connection between them unlike the original which had a tight group of four close friends this time around they are a bunch of unlikeable underdeveloped clichés like the self serving yuppie, the 'strong' female, the big cop, the middle class hero & the antagonistic redneck. I was also disappointed with the lack of social satire, unlike Romero's original which had meaning this is a shallow film where the mall is used as a place to hide & nothing more. When Dawn of the Dead '04 does do something different like the zombie baby or the fact the zombies actually run it goes nowhere & they seem like afterthoughts just for the hell of it. Having said that Dawn of the Dead '04 is far from a bad film, it moves along at nice pace, it has some decent if unspectacular set-pieces & action scenes, I must admit I really liked the ending with the video taped footage during the closing credits, it's very sleek & it certainly passes 100 odd minutes entertainingly enough but it had an almost impossible task to better the original which it most definitely doesn't in any way.
Director Snyder does OK & there's plenty of homages to the original including cameo's from Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger & the ever watchable Tom Savini along with the BP trucks from the original turning up as does the WGON traffic helicopter also from the original. Gore wise I thought Dawn of the Dead '04 was very disappointing, there's no big gore scenes unlike the original, there's nothing in here to rival the screwdriver in the ear or the zombie having the top of his head sliced off by helicopter blades or zombies having machetes shoved into their faces or the gruesome cannibalistic scenes at the end. All this new version has to offer are better looking zombies, some gunshot wounds to the head, a spike through a zombies head, a poker through a zombies eye & after that I'm actually struggling, there's nothing here that memorable that will have people talking unlike Dawn of the Dead '78.
With a supposed budget of about $28,000,000 Dawn of the Dead '04 obviously is better made than the original with that big budget Hollywood polish about it, it's well made & has good special effects. Apparently the budget for Dawn of the Dead '04 was 'significantly slashed' by Universal after the critical & commercial failure of House of the Dead (2003). The acting is forgettable, I must admit I disliked most of the character's in this.
Dawn of the Dead is a perfectly watchable & entertaining horror film that is certainly worth a watch but I think it pales into insignificance when compared to Dawn of the Dead '78, it seems to have a good reputation but it just didn't for much for me. However if you like shallow story lines, poor character's & no stand out set-pieces then you too might like it. Good but not brilliant & overall pretty disappointing.