The new remake of George A Romero's 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead is a rip snorting, brain-busting (well, brain-severing), powerhouse of a horror movie that completely blew me away. It's the most invigorating cinematic experience I've had this year. If you are in any way inclined toward visceral, hardcore cinema, you simply must see this.
Like the original Dawn of the Dead, it follows a group of people holing up in a deserted mall trying to survive what seems to be the end of the world. The dead have inexplicably risen from the grave with a mindless, supercharged taste for human flesh, and the virus (if you can call it that) is instantly transferred with a single bite. They can only be stopped by severing the brain from the rest of the body.
The original version had a quartet of survivors (a couple of whom make cameos here), but this time around we have a young nurse, Ana (Indie darling Sarah Polley - The Sweet Hereafter, Go), a stoic cop (Ving Rhames - Pulp Fiction), a thrice-divorced father (Jake Weber - U571), a young African American man and his heavily pregnant immigrant wife (Mekhi Phifier - ER, Inna Korobkina), a trio of trigger happy mall security guards and several others who arrive in a truck.
As the zombies exponentially swarm in numbers all around the mall (and presumably, the planet) the survivors do their best to remain sane, but eventually realise they won't be able to last forever in their consumer wonderland.
I was a big fan of the original film, and was thus very sceptical when a remake was announced. But this film very much impressed me. It's a no-holds-barred, violence and tension-strewn ride which never slows down.
The exquisitely crafted opening ten minutes grab you by the jugular, and the film never really lets up. Director Zack Snyder, making his feature debut here, comes from the world of commercials and music videos, which usually doesn't bode well, but he has done a fantastic job.
Romero's version (which was the follow-up to his classic Night of the Living Dead) was celebrated not only for being a masterful horror film, but for wittily commenting on consumer culture with scenes of the mindless zombies stumbling around the mall. But it was hardly advanced anthropology.
The new film, despite also being set in a mall, doesn't spend much time on social commentary, but it doesn't suffer for it. It has its own sense of humour - one scene has a bored survivor with a sniper rifle on a rooftop picking off zombies who resemble celebrities from the amassing crowd.
The zombies in Romero's film were slow and lumbering, while here they run at top speed, like in the far lesser, Romero-derivative 28 Days Later. While the 1978 film possessed a slow, creeping unstoppable dread, the remake has more of an urgent, panicked mania.
Dawn of the Dead is very well cast - none of the actors are typical horror players, and the film benefits greatly from this. Canadian Polley has resisted the mainstream for years (Cameron Crowe wrote the lead role in Almost Famous for her, but she rejected it), and this is a very interesting choice for her first (sort of) broad appeal film.
Weber is an underappreciated character actor (he starred in the critically acclaimed short-lived cult series American Gothic) who lends a calming, realistic presence here. Rhames is also very grounding as the no-nonsense cop. And the heretofore unknown Ty Burrell has great fun as the weaselly, whiny Steve.
