Dawn of the Dead
When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.
There is something fundamentally wrong about fast moving and feral zombies. The more traditional shufflers are horrifying not only because of their sheer weight of numbers, but also because they are clearly walking dead and their mindless persistence can be viewed as a metaphor for death itself – no matter how far or fast you run, they just keep on coming.
28 Days Later managed to make a different kind of zombie work by not explicitly claiming that the infected were zombies. Instead, the film derived it’s horror from different fears – disease and infection.
Unfortunately, following the success of 28 Days Later, someone, somewhere has decided that shufflers simply aren’t cool any more.
Which brings us to the remake of Dawn of the Dead. The fast moving zombies of this film are less horrific than the more traditional zombies of earlier films as their newly feral nature has caused them to lose overtones of the inevitability of death but without finding an alternative fear to trade off.
This makes the film much more of an action movie than a horror film.
Remaking a horror film as an action movie isn’t an altogether bad idea – it certainly worked with Aliens – and if you watch Dawn of the Dead with this genre change in mind, it’s a reasonably good film.
Ana (Sarah Polley) enjoys a happy suburban existence with a loving husband and a cheerful daughter. So it’s not giving much away to say that her world is turned upside down when her newly feral daughter attacks and kills her husband.
Things get even worse when her husband comes back to life and attacks Ana.
Escaping through a bathroom window, she steps into a world gone mad. Cars have collided, fires have started all over the place, the feral undead are rampaging and those that haven’t already been killed are both bewildered and paranoid.
Trying to escape by car, Ana manages to get away from the worst of the chaos, but not to safety.
Her chances of survival are improved, however, when she is found by Kenneth (Ving Rhames) who – fortunately for Ana – has cottoned on to the fact that the zombies aren’t very talkative.
Soon after, the pair of them encounter a further three people – including a pregnant woman (who, later, provides one of the few truly shocking scenes in the film) – led by the practical everyman Michael (Jake Weber) and, after some more paranoid negotiation, they head to the shopping mall.
In some ways it would have been better if this film hadn’t been sold as a remake of Romero’s film. Although the discussion between the characters does make it clear that there is no way forward and no way back, there is also a feeling that they have decided to go to the mall because they are in a Dawn of the Dead remake.
At the mall we are spared any attempt to emulate Romero’s satirical take on consumerism and, instead, see more paranoia, suspicion and the determination – on the part of CJ (Michael Kelly), the head of the three surviving security guards already in the mall – to maintain a pre-chaos hierarchy as a substitute for action.
That said, it’s a shame that the mall setting is so under used. The zombies are outside because the survivors are inside – there is no sense that they are drawn to the shopping centre itself and, from the behaviour of the characters, they could just have easily have been holed up in an office building.
Although there are some very downbeat elements to the film, these are not really developed and the sensibility is much more one of gung-ho action. Certainly there is a lot of suspicion and paranoia amongst the characters, but this is driven more by the requirements of the plot and justified (reasonably enough) in terms of the characters not really knowing what is going on.
However, with the arrival of a second group of survivors and a growing relationship with Andy (Bruce Bohne) – a gun store owner who has taken refuge on top of his own shop, in sight of the mall but out of reach –a more cooperative dynamic starts to emerge amongst the characters and the plot moves forward as they start thinking in terms of escaping.
At its best, Dawn of the Dead does deliver a sense of confusion and inertia amongst the characters, provides some nicely staged set pieces and does have a dark sense of humour to it.
On the downside, it lacks both the claustrophobic feel that Romero managed to give to being trapped inside a shopping mall and the characters are not particularly dimensional – coming across as stereotypes rather than people.
At the end of the day, Dawn of the Dead is an entertaining – if unambitious – action film that doesn’t really become horrific unless you are willing to sit through the end credits.
As action films go, it’s not a bad one - the pace of the film largely manages to cover the (occasionally huge) plot holes and, as remakes go, it’s certainly one of the better ones to have been released in recent years.
Monday 19 Apr 2004 | Paul Pritchard | Action, Horror
