Dawn of the Dead (2004)
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Director: Zack Snyder. Cast: Sarah Polley, Jake Weber, Ving Rhames, Mekhi Phifer, Inna Korobkina, Michael Kelly, Kevin Zegers,
Michael Barry, Ty Burrell, Lindy Booth, Matt Frewer, Jayne Eastwood, R.D. Reid, Boyd Banks, Kim Poirier, Bruce Bohne, Justin
Louis, Hannah Lochner, Ermes Blarasin. Screenplay: James Gunn (based on the 1978 film and script by George A. Romero).
Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead is one of those movies that deeply unsettles the whole act of leaving the
theater. Having just watched the world descend, literally overnight, into a slash-and-burn mosh pit of frenetic,
cannibalizing zombies, your first steps back into the outside world are a little tentative, even if you think you're a
bit too adult to be frightened this way. The lingering fear isn't helped at all if you walk out of Dawn of the Dead
and head immediately, as I did, into a shopping mall. Given the central locale of this movie and what happens there, the
venues mostly likely to be playing Dawn of the Dead are the last places you want to be when it's over.
That was the first time I saw Dawn of the Dead, in March, when it opened. I returned to it this week, in July, as the
film made its tour of my local college cinema, and I wanted to take my mind off of other things, which Dawn of the Dead
more than amply manages to do. In fact, just try thinking about anything else while watching this lean, mean,
hugely enervating movie. For a while, you think the film's going to let you stay a step
or two ahead. As Ana (Sarah Polley), a twentysomething nurse, drags herself through the overtime hours of a hospital shift,
you overhear that a bite victim has been unaccountably moved into the intensive care unit. As she drives home, she switches
the radio dial just as some anonymous anchor says "confirmed it is not an isolated..." We know what this means, especially if we've
seen George Romero's 1978 original, itself a sequel to Romero's 1968's Night of the Living Dead and a precursor to 1985's
Day of the Dead. Ana doesn't know. She seems like an optimistic person, kind to children and good at her job,
self-possessed enough to watch a gruesome horror movie, I'd conjecture, but happier to come home and flop on the bed with her
husband, Luis, as the latest reality-TV opus winds itself up. She doesn't know.
She finds out quickly, at 6:38 the next morning, as the cute girl down the street—named "Vivian," of all things—leaps into
her bedroom and chews quite a chunk out of Luis' neck. As the little zombie cooties almost immediately galvanize his
bloodstream and he, red-eyed and agile, makes a leonine pounce at Ana, the movie enjoys its first great moment: this swift
chick gets a one-second reaction-shot to assess what's happening, thinks to grab the car keys, and lunges into the bathroom,
locking the door. (No girl or woman played by Sarah Polley, the cerebral hottie from Go and The
Weight of Water, is ever a dim bulb.) The overhead shot of Ana, stumbling into her bathtub, is straight out of
Psycho; a soon-to-follow shot of Luis' face as he breaks through the paneling of the bathroom
door has The Shining's stamp all over it. Ana is stronger than Shelley Duvall, and more importantly, she has better
luck than Janet Leigh. That is, she's dressed, and her shower has a window.
Here's one of those thoughts that immediately passes through a film critic's synapses during a promising set-up like this: in
two quick scenes, Snyder and screenwriter James Gunn have established that a) Ana is happily married, and b) the instant her
husband goes nuts, she's outta there like a shot, without forgetting to swipe the keys. That's bliss to bye-bye in five seconds
or less, folks. It's not that Ana doesn't care about Luis, or doesn't palpably grieve him later in the movie, but Dawn of the
Dead.v.04 is speedy, and things happen speedily to people who've gotta be speedy to stay alive. Slow-pokes and sentimentalists
are goners. This is Dawn of the Dead for the age of fiber-optics, a world where information, paranoia, and nasty
viruses travel quickquickquick, and dangers, like pleasures, are instantaneous. The movie is ruthlessly pragmatic about
the implications for who can get by in a world like this and who can't.
Snyder, a first-time feature director, and Gunn (whose penning of the Scooby-Doo movie's shouldn't unfairly bias you)
have taken a lot of heat for, among other things, making their zombies quite so jet-propelled and making their characters
quite so un-characterlike. Ana is the person we know best in this movie, and here's what we know about her: she's a nurse,
her husband's dead (or, in a later character's parlance, "dead-ish"), her orderly suburban-Wisconsin street is trashed, she
feels bad for chubby mailmen who get voted out of Survivor, and she doesn't think you should shoot people who aren't
provably zombies. This is not a lot to go on, but it's perfectly suited to the film's purpose, where basic, improvised
survival doesn't lead to a lot of sharing, nor does it accommodate a lot of diverse, character-revealing approaches. Because
the remake has been thoughtfully cast, the acting is clever enough to make these characters seem like people we aren't quite
meeting, rather than simple cyphers. For the same reason, when
personal info does roll down the pike, as when we find out that so-and-so has a brother and so-and-so has kids (all of them,
doubtless, dead-ish), the movie has been built to make those moments pop. They hurt. Dawn of the Dead isn't dillying
around on-screen forgetting to "round out" its characters; it's a movie about characters who are unlikely to feel rounded
out under the circumstances, and who may not be so "rounded" to begin with.
Romero's version was also famously skeptical about the roundedness of modern personalities. His small troupe of survivors
were, by design, not appreciably more compelling than the sludgy, brainless zombies they were garrisoned against. I am perplexed that
so many of the same reviewers that knock Snyder's version get all choked up at the memory of Romero's, endlessly praising
its "satiric" value. Yeah, the original Dawn of the Dead works pretty well as a poke at the mindless zombism of
consumerist culture, but whether this is enough of an insight to power a film that, at 126 minutes, is at least a quarter-hour
too long strikes me as an open question. Particularly since I can't help noticing that a lot (not all) of the reviewers
reiterating this line of well-known praise cry foul at the slightest suggestion of embedded cultural content or "overreading"
analysis in pop films made today.
Romero's movie is not a slam dunk (though I think Night of the Living Dead is). There's plenty of room to remake it,
especially since it functions well as a mood piece about timely anxieties, a sense of the world coming unhinged. The same
anxieties obviously underline the present cultural moment, and Snyder's Dawn of the Dead so cunningly
capitalizes on rampant social unease that it both embodies and feeds into that much-ballyhooed "culture of fear" at least
as well as something like Fahrenheit 9/11 does. And Snyder is a smart, resourceful filmmaker,
borrowing often from his idols but wholly proficient at giving this picture a tenor and a style of its own. For one, it's
framed by the two most remarkable credits sequences of the year so far. The opening montage, which actually plays out about
fifteen minutes into the movie, is a scalpel-sharp blend of televised mayhem, gruesome stock footage, and enervated video feeds:
mass prayers, explosions in the streets, toppled buildings, all interspersed with jagged and blood-streaked credits, all of it
scored to Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around," from the American recordings. Is this a whirlwind of recent news
footage, or have Snyder & Co. built it from scratch? It's precisely to the point that either scenario is possible;
we can't fully distinguish our own world from one overrun by zombies. (The final credit reel is even more of a doozy, but you
have to sit through all of it to know why.)
This Dawn of the Dead seems to know, maybe better than Romero, that the material can support a generalized read of
the culture but not any complex or sustained statement; the movie lives or dies (sorry!) as a style exercise, and by that
standard, it is more than admirable. Matthew F. Leonetti, cinematographer of Kathryn Bigelow's Strange
Days, that underseen gem of a techno-millennial romantic action blowout, works comparably well here with bold,
high-contrast colors and controlled shots even of frenetic motion. The speed of the zombies would only seem like an MTV-era
cheat if the camera, too, were racing and restless, but Dawn of the Dead favors mostly simple set-ups. The energy comes from
the choreography of the set-pieces, the sequencing of the action, and the conviction of the actors, not from dizzying pans or
Edward Scissorhanding in the editing room. The makeup and stunt work of the zombies is impressive, as are the purposefully graceless
trips and falls of the main actors and the stunt people playing them. Characters are constantly knocking their heads or twisting
their ankles in this movie, crashing their vehicles or losing their balance. Such clumsiness, occasioned by sheer panic, is
perennially missing from horror films, except when a buxom young girl can't undo a door-lock in time. Here, though, almost
as many people get hurt or killed by chaos associated with the zombies as by the zombies themselves: a totally non-diegetic
car crash seen in an overhead shot when Ana first flees her house is an example of this collateral damage, to which all the
characters remain vulnerable throughout the film. (One unforeseen demise toward the end of the movie is especially grisly,
but just as true to the logic of what's happening.)
There's very little if anything in the movie that plain doesn't work. Yes, some of it is over-familiar. True, a lot of conversations
in the final third reiterate time-honored formulations of "We can't just sit here while..." or "We need to do something."
A monstrous pregnancy and delivery are pure murder to watch, but you see the payoffs coming for too long in advance; the wit
and unexpectedness of so many other moments in the movie refract badly on the rare instants of heavy foreshadowing. When the survivors outfit a
couple of security vans into armored transport for plowing through the leprous crowd outside, Snyder films their preparations
in a semi-pointless shot beneath a rote rock soundtrack, and the actual barnstorming out of the parking garage is straight
out of Aliens.
Still and all, you have to look pretty closely for elements one might have cut—and what a contrast to the glut of mall movies, in
this genre more than most, where entire plotlines feel unnecessary and entire movies might as well be skipped. Look at
how much devilish glee is taken in the blink-and-you-miss-it moment when the cast first use the shopping mall's elevators,
and we notice that the doors are the kind that pause for a second before closing: uh-oh. Note the presence of two black
guys in the headlining cast, so that all bets are officially off for who dies first. Relish the combination of comedy,
pathos, and small-scale characterization that derive from an element added from Romero's blueprint, the mall crowd's telegraphed
interactions with a nearby store owner who's stranded on his roof. (This is also, by the way, a pretty great joke: a small
business called Andy's Gun Works that thrives across the street from a boutique mall...and improbably enough, Andy's Gun Works
actually has an Andy in it!) Dawn of the Dead feels well-plotted, well-designed, and well-executed, the best American
movie from Spring 2004 short of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's an impressive
piece of machinery with a hot sense of real dread at its core, and a keen tension between isolationism and involvement threaded
through its scenes. Genuine weight is afforded these deliberations, and we care what is decided, yet the dark imputation of
the film is that none of it may really matter. Grade: A–