Well, it is set in a mall...

Rating: Null/10 (31 March 2004)

The original Dawn of the Dead is a classic horror flick with a genuinely frightening atmosphere. This new one is a completely different film, except, of course, that there are some scenes set in a shopping mall. There are some scary scenes, but they are scary in an action-movie sense rather than a dread inducing horror-movie sense. I may be the only one who still thinks that the old-school slow zombies are more frightening than the running ones; the situation that you must appreciate as far as the slow zombies are concerned is that a false sense of confidence can be inspired in the characters because the zombies are dumb and you can out-run them. In the original Dawn, the characters who respected the sheer number of zombies and had a rational outlook concerning how to problem-solve their way out of bad situations are the ones who achieved a degree of success. In this remake, the only real problem solving is the decision to hide in a mall, which is inexplicably devoid of zombies at first, and then to build ridiculous tanks out of mall trolleys. Every evasion scene is just shoot-em up. The remake is just like the original, except stripped of all creativity and appeal. What else is wrong with the remake: character development (one of the characters you are actually supposed to care about, and I think there are only two in all, blurts out over a group dinner that he has had many jobs in life, and the worst job in his life has been as a husband and his best has been as a father. Well so what? If those are the first and last bits of significant personal information that we hear from you, why do we care about your past or your future?) All motivation in the characters seems completely alien to me. Why does that girl go after the dog (at such risk), why does the group go after her (at such risk), and another thing, how doesn't zombie Andy get her out of that closet? Also, how does the head mall security guard go from jerk to team player without a visible trigger event? And why was he such an unreasonable jerk from the beginning? Contrivance. There doesn't seem to be human logic at play in the minds of the characters. There seems to be the logic of a screenwriter who is trying to get the most out of stock characters and failing miserably, in the process omitting any human logic in an attempt to get certain character types to clash with others. I hope there was an hour or so edited from this film that will be released on the dvd so the director can explain how this tepid final product came about. Hopefully there were a lot of important things that had to be cut out, which crippled the picture. If the theater version was how the film was intended to be, then I would be completely speechless. I am not sure what Romero thinks about the remake, but if he is sane, he should just walk his fat royalties check over to the bank, set to work at publicly denouncing the remake, and then finally get another 'Dead' movie of his own out.