shut up and lurk

Rating: 6/10 (17 April 2008)

An effective evocation of post-apocalyptic loneliness and heartbreak as buff scientist Will Smith, who does great work here, experiences the big city as jungle. As long as he's on his own with his dog, this is quite riveting, and there are several good suspense sequences and emotional moments. But when it tries to get deep it slips badly. The talking-to-mannequins stuff just doesn't work, and can you get more corny than using the Other Survivor as a pretext for a Science Versus Religion debate? The stuff about the zombies' social/kinship instincts fails to engage for the simple reason that they all look and act like they were in a video game. And the ending is insufferable. Can you imagine how much more Land of the Dead would have sucked if they got to Canada and it really WAS a utopian refuge? (shades of Joyce Weiland - "ORGANIC GARDENING") Well it wouldn't have been any worse than what these guys make of Vermont.