Decent Pop Culture Nihilism

Rating: 7/10 (24 April 2010)

If nothing else, the phenomenal popularity of Zack Snyder's 2004 re-visioning of DAWN OF THE DEAD is proof positive that deep down inside our contemporary youth culture is still as morose and titillated by carnage & destruction as mine was. I missed the frenzy of excitement + hype over this film at the time of release, too fully absorbed in my own fascination with European made horror from the 60s and 70s to be bothered with a modern day remake of anything by George A. Romero. A remake of his 1978 DAWN OF THE DEAD seemed especially futile since part of the reason why that movie worked is as a reaction against the tacky polyester disco suit pop culture of the Carter years. People whine about Bush but I had to live through Carter and trust me, it was worse, though after seeing it Snyder's remake I can say it is exactly the movie that the post 9/11 War On Terror era had coming. In spite of its grim source material the film manages to upbeat, exciting, engaging, and most of all fun. Go figure.
Was Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD fun? Kind of, or rather its satire angle gave the mayhem a kick in the pants that was absent from so much of the similar material from the era. Much of it was genuinely hilarious within the context of the film like the priceless epic fail gag where the zombie rises up to attack only to have the top of its head lopped off by a helicopter blade. We had been waiting nearly 20 years to see something like that and at the time it brought down the house. But one of the reasons why Romero's DAWN worked so well is the plodding, relentless course of doom that focuses the film's central themes of the world having come to an end. Even an idyllic life in a fully stocked shopping mall won't cut it, with the primary underlying conflict in the film being providing the survivors with a reason to get the hell out of there.
Snyder's remake does an admirable job of imparting that need before its survivors even get settled in for the long haul. I never felt at home in this mall, which was so impersonal and unaccommodating that even the toilets were fakes in the home decor shop the primaries are forced to bed down in. Then again the film never pauses to really let them get used to being there -- something the 1978 version went to great lengths to depict -- with the zombies existing almost as a Greek chorus to keep the plot moving along. Random new characters are inserted to up the body counts and provide emotional draws for the audience to identify with, including a cute dog put to work in the crux scene where the film starts to spiral out of control and they are finally forced to abandon the mall to the zombies.
Who are more interested in chasing down the surviving humans en masse like they were storming a free Michael Jackson concert. Similar to the creatures in Umberto Lenzi's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD the zombies are fast, deadly, and instinctively trained in hand to hand combat, a fringe benefit of being bitten & transformed. To hell with bombing Iran, we should set a horde of zombies loose on them and flood the airwaves with Johnny Cash songs. They'd go belly up inside of a week. The one complaint I had about the zombies was that fighting them off became a video game, complete with a sewer level where they lost the blue key while getting fresh ammo packs + quad damage. When the movie finally sputtered to an end all I could think was, What no Boss Monster? Which might come across as a criticism but then again this is the visual language that the target audience (10 to 40 year old tech savvy consumers) knows & speaks best. I was grateful Snyder spared us having to use cheat codes on a Thrall map.
A subtle zombie movie wouldn't have been appropriate either, with the mold for the film's approach lying somewhere between the Italian horror epics and Dan O'Bannon's punk rock RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. But unlike that film Snyder's remake retains an air of sobriety and grim seriousness that was strangely refreshing, and quite fitting for some of the 9/11 era images of urban destruction it depicted. There was one shot of a street littered with office paper that was right out of the WTC photo memorials, and Snyder's makeup crew did a marvelous job of creating their zombies by basing the imagery on autopsy photos. All of it felt quite real even if the primary focus of the cinematographers was to find white surfaces for brains to splatter on when a zombie got shot in the head. But hey, that comes with the territory.
The film had two great contributions to zombie lore as well, first with Michael Kelly's superb character of C.J. the cynical security guard, and a zombie baby birth that like the head in the helicopter blade gag was exactly what we had been waiting another 20 years to see. Ving Rhames also created an excellent character with his gruff Officer Ken, and the film manages to maintain a level of mayhem throughout its length that is quite worthy of the traditions on which the movie drew (including a first rate quickie scene of a Presidential Guard detail gunning down a group of journalists who get to close: my kind of stuff!). All of it works pretty well though it is definitely more of a "re-visioning" of Romero's scenario rather than a remake. I guess they felt compelled to re-use the title as an homage because its a very different film, very well made and very worthy of being seen. Even if nobody actually gets eaten.
7/10