Zack Snyder’s feature film debut, Dawn of the Dead, is a “reimagining” of George Romero’s classic by the same name. However, while loosely mimicking the original for commercial advantage, Snyder’s work fails to challenge the viewer, amid falling short of even its limited sights via stock characters, unsteady pacing, and unbearable illogic.
Luis (Justin Louis) awakens one morning, is bitten by the girl next door (Hannah Lochner), and dies before quickly resurrecting as a zombie. Luis’s wife, Ana (Sarah Polley), after evading her undead husband, finds herself fleeing amid apocalyptic chaos before finding refuge in the local mall with five others. As the unexplained plague spreads, more people flock to the sanctity of the enclosure before everyone is forced to take flight once more with the vain hope that a makeshift caravan of armored shuttle buses will carry them to a nearby dock where a boat owned by one of the disenfranchised will escort them to a quarantined island.
It was Romero’s right to rewrite his own work in 1990 with Night of the Living Dead in that, just as someone who paints a picture is justified in setting it aflame if the artist so desires, the originator of the 1968 classic is permitted do, for better or ill, what he may with his own baby. However, if someone outside the original camp fucks up the painting, the creator, as well as those who enjoyed the work, has the right to demand the decadent’s head on a stick considering sacred ground has been unjustifiably desecrated.
In respect to the original Romero masterpiece, Snyder’s work is completely arbitrary in that it barely shadows its precursor outside of characterization and setting, while leaving plot and structure (to say nothing of content) behind. However, it leans too heavily on the original to be an homage as it thinly skirts cinematic plagiarism in order to utilize the title (which makes a convincing argument that the director didn’t learn anything from the master’s satire). Case in point, we have similar locales (the mall, mind you, because we’ve moved from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin for no apparent reason atop the fact that the film was shot in Canada and that it has no American feel to it) amid a zombie apocalypse with two characters, Kenneth (Ving Rhames) and Ana, who resemble figures from the 1978 edition, Peter and Fran respectively, as yet again we witness the youth feeding off the adult populace. However, aside from these factors, there is nothing which merits the title aside from commercial advantage. The pointed satire (yes, we have a white picket neighborhood, replete with didactic American flag, which is less than idyllic, but we quickly take flight from the scene instead of being allowed to examine it–what of introducing the scenario instead of thrusting us into it seconds before Hell breaks loose?), commercialism (characters in Snyder’s film linguistically mimic a news report but this is fleeting and the director fails to develop the theme), and irony (we watch the characters enjoy the contents of the mall but, unlike Romero, without the sardonic intonation of the circumstance, but that would be calling the kettle black considering we are dealing with a remake) have all been removed, which is what, in essence, made the original the landmark that it is. In short, a work should only be remade if the original’s contents are relevant today, which Dawn could be cast in such a light but, of course, wasn’t. Hasn’t commercialism shifted in twenty years a remarkable degree to the online medium? Anyone up for an internet café safe hold?
What’s of greater interest is the happenstance similarities between Snyder’s film and Romero’s Day of the Dead. I will consent to the fact that the film is unrelentingly menacing from the get-go, much like its predecessor. More specific similarities include a belligerent faction of security guards arguing with a nurse, which aligns itself with the polar division between the military and the medical establishment in Romero’s film, atop the fact that Snyder’s rendition concludes with a resolution which seems a little too familiar.
Okay, what’s left? Some say that if one were to view the work sans title, that it stands on its own two feet rather well. I beg to differ. Snyder’s film helped propel the new age “fast zombie” (what a friend of mine loving refers to as “Trioxin zombies”) into the limelight (the point being that Snyder was far from the first to quicken the metabolism of the undead). Now, I have issue with such antagonists in that, for Dan O’Brannon’s 1985 comic romp, The Return of the Living Dead, his fast paced reanimateds mock the conventional zombie, yet it doesn’t seem as if Snyder is aware that this was a joke because once you fast forward the droves of the undead in all seriousness, it becomes too easy in that one isn’t able to sustain the dread because we are promised quick deaths instead of having our nerves wretched at the thought of a slow, evitable demise. As a result, Snyder’s production is filled, not with anxiety, which for the horror director is the penultimate accomplishment, but with gratuitous shocks, a.k.a. “jumpy moments,” devoid of content which are as forgettable as the time in which they took to occur. What can be expected from a former commercial director of Nike ads who smears his latter day sponsor’s logo feces, a.k.a. “product placement,” all over the screen without apology (cf. Andre’s wardrobe)?
The lack of thought put into the nature of horror extends outward as the director fails to present his audience with a plausible storyline. When our protagonist, Ana, finds herself amid a pack of survivors and its self-appointed leader, Michael (Jake Weber), decides that they are going to seek refuge in the mall (the first place which, for most of us, comes to mind when we think unpopulated, right?), the camera pans up and bam, they’re there, no strings attached as the parking lot is as empty as the theater should have been when this movie was released.
The craft of filmmaking was also lost on the director as we are issued, not shot after shot of gratuitous celluloid, but purely wasted film. For example, the first confrontation with the undead once on location at the mall occurs with a zombified janitor. However, we cut back and forth between Michael sashaying his way through a sporting goods store and a mop head as he makes his way to the feasting monster in the broom closet. Now, it isn’t that the mop is scary mind you, rather, Snyder seems to believe that it is important that the zombie was the janitor for whatever reason, thus the emphasis on the cleaning tool. Predictably, Michael dispenses with the janitor with ease and nothing else comes of the situation. Unfortunately, the arbitrary editing isn’t isolated to this one scene. Also during this time, Kenneth sustains an injury as he falls into the fountain while battling one of the undead. However, the possibility that the infection originated via the water supply is negated when the character remains unchanged. Yet, Snyder isn’t eliminating possibilities here but merely wasting time once again because it was he who posited the possibility that the disease was traveling via the aquatic medium in the first place (not a traditional venue for infection in zombie cinema) after pausing and narrowing our focus upon Ana as she washed her infected, bloody hands in the same reservoir. Also, after a taut moment, approximately midway through the film, the director foolishly cuts straight to a lighthearted sequence, flipping the release valve instead of easing upon on it gradually. As such, we are given that what proceeded isn’t to be viewed as our fortune for having escaped, but rather was of little consequence and should be discarded accordingly. Lastly, there’s the incongruity when we are first introduced to Andy (Bruce Bohne), the lone sniper stranded across the street, as we peer at him through our primary group’s binoculars (in our POV we can barely make him out). However, Ana, without the visual aide, asks, “What’s he pointing at?” as the camera pans behind the characters (thus further away from Andy) to a helicopter which is deafeningly hovering two buildings away.
I will grant that the remake has its moments, all of which, however few and far between, are removed from the original. Given time, a zombie baby was bound to pop up sometime in undead cinema, and it does, guess where?, Snyder’s production. To what effect? None whatsoever. Synder prided himself that he allowed for more character development than in the original, but what he succeeded in doing was creating stock characters painted with a black and white pallet. The only instance of character development is seen in the asshole security guard-cum-martyr CJ (Michael Kelly), though his transition is less than believable due to the fact that his former self was cast so diligently as to be a cardinal trait, thus is inconceivably removed, not only in a short duration, but at all. Furthermore, we have a strong female character, Ana, and a female who’s pregnant, Luda (Inna Korobkina), but not all-in-one as in Romero’s vision, making the efforts of the latter all the more admirable. Yet, to Synder’s credit, the character of Andy does evoke a fair amount of pity as Polley, and especially Weber, show that they belong in more challenging roles as they give more to their parts than what was to be found on the constriction referred to as the script. All cynicism aside, without a doubt, the highlight of the film is the pre-credit sequence where Ana is fleeing amid one of the better choreographed sequences involving mass mayhem and chaotic anarchy. Unfortunately for Snyder, a film continues after the director has been given credit and that’s were the problem lies for the remainder of the movie.
Ultimately, I view the film in the following light: Toward the end of the production, we witness the survivors customizing the mall’s shuttle buses in order to make their big escape. One character, Nicole (Lindy Booth), is seen spray painting teeth onto the front of the snow plow. Now, ahem, I don’t believe that the faux choppers add anything to the film outside of the non sequitur of ill-spent time in the wake of an apocalypse (yes, one could argue this is set to display the lack of thought on Nicole’s behalf, yet I offer the rebuttal that someone, somewhere, would more than likely tell the girl to quit dicking around). For me, this moment serves as a succinct metaphor for the film itself. Bottom line: If removed from the title and the trademark setting, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead had the energy to stand a smidgen above the standard horror movie of the day but fails to think through what it is presenting as it departs from its viewers while they shake their heads when another propane tank explodes, leaving the bad guys dead even though the good guys where in the same proximity of the explosion but, nonetheless, remain unscathed. In this regard, run toward the clearing and rewatch Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.
The Blu-ray disc does not include much that the original DVD doesn’t have, that is with the exception of the U-Control where you can interact with exclusive interviews and behind the scenes stuff while watching the movie. That feature is well worth it’s weight in gold if you really want to get into the heads of the actors and filmmakers and such to see what they thought about the whole process behind the remake and all. Other than that the only other feature we get is commentary with Director Zack Snyder and Producer Eric Newman.
Trivia tidbit: The survivors’ makeshift “Arks” as they call them are precursors to–as irony would have it–Romero’s Dead Reckoning in the following year’s Land of the Dead. However, before you begin to quibble, keep in mind Romero had penned his work long before the remake was given a scant thought (LOTD is a rewrite of the original script for Day of the Dead). What’s left is an interesting coincidence in the history of the subgenre.
– Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
