Movie remakes are a tricky thing. People will accept any number of interpretations of a play or a song but there's something permanent about a movie that makes a new version a difficult sell. Even something like a zombie movie will have it's adherents who don't want to see the original version they enjoy "tarnished" by a second version. It's this mind-set that the remake of Dawn of the Dead has to work against.
Discussing the differences between the original DotD and the remake seems like a sure fire way to turn the review into a nonsensical fanboy ranting about every way one version doesn't measure up to another. I'm still going that route for three reasons:
First up...
Zombies
It's a variety of other things that actually make the movie work or not but, let's face it, nobody would go see the movies if they didn't have zombies. While watching the remake I was struck by how less terrifying I found the zombies in the new DotD when compared to the original. At the time I chalked it up to not being as young and impressionable as I was when I watched the original DotD. But after giving some post-screening thought I realized there were several changes made to the zombies that didn't make them scare me like they used to. The primary change to the zombies is that while they are still technically the dead who have come back to life, the only way that a zombie can be created is being bitten by another zombie. One of the characters even goes so far as to say that the undead spreads like a virus, or even could be a virus. This means that anyone in the movie who dies through anything other than being bitten by a zombie is simply dead. Giving a partial, rational explanation for where the zombies come from dilutes some of their effectiveness. The old version zombies were terrifying because they were such a mockery of death. Instead of the loss that death brings being cushioned by the thoughts that it brings a release from pain, a promise of an afterlife or whatever, it instead only made someone a mindless, shambling thing. The comfort of knowing that a loved one had died peacefully in their sleep was now replaced with the grotesque need to destroy their body before they became reanimated and started eating people. Something that acts like a virus is explainable and can be dealt with, unlike the idea of the dead coming back to life as monsters. In a lot of ways the zombies of the new DotD reminded me of the plague victims in George Romero's The Crazies instead of his more well known zombie movies.
Another major change is that these new zombies are fast. I guess being dead means you can ignore the exhaustion that comes from burning calories when you move because once the zombies spot a living person they're off and running. While this makes sense for freshly dead zombies I didn't understand how the zombies who have gone past their expiration date were still able to move so quickly. The impression of the zombies as the movie went on was less that they were rotting corpses and more that they were extras in ghoul make-up who were being forced to run sprints. The original zombies tapped into that primal fear of dead bodies by being dead bodies that somehow continued to move. Or at least the actors who were good at portraying zombies brought that feeling across. In a number of crowd scenes some of the zombie extras looked less like abominations of nature and more like amateur drunks stumbling around on New Year's Eve.
I wonder why it was decided that the zombies in the new DotD should be limber and virus victims. Was it done to make the zombies seem like a more credible threat? [The old zombies, while scary, were so slow that they could be outpaced with a casual walk.] Or was there a deeper meaning behind the changes? At this point I'm not sure. I'll get into over-analyzing the movies in a moment but for now...
When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping
The story of both movies can be broken down into the simple but crazy idea that zombies are taking over the world and a group of survivors are hiding out in a shopping mall. The two movies take a very different approach to handling both this premise and the characters in the story. In the original four survivors squirrel themselves away in a shopping mall for months. Having only four primary characters and then spending a large amount of time with them gives the audience a chance to get to know who these people are. They still do stupid things that get themselves killed but now when you yell at the screen "Don't go in there!" you're able to address the character by name. The remake has far too many people running around it's mall, to the point where several of them might as well walk around in t-shirts that have "Zombie Bait" written on the front. Of the batch only the characters played by Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, and Mekhi Phifer actually register. This large cast leads to some nice touches -the death of Matt Frewer was well done- but too many of the characters get left behind. I would have liked to have seen more time spent on the development arc of CJ [Michael Kelly] but the new DotD was in such a hurry to destroy the world that it didn't have time to slow down for the guy.
The faster pace of the new DotD did provide one realistic touch I liked; the power in the mall was lost in fairly short order. What sort of monster generator was hooked up to the mall in the original DotD that allowed the survivors to run every piece of electrical equipment in the mall at full blast for months on end without worrying about running out of juice? With the exception of a zombie holocaust, why did a mall need a generator like that anyway? In the 1970's they built malls to last.
The new DotD manages to be both a leaner and lumpier movie than it's predecessor. The movie gets off to a flying start with the world going straight to hell before the opening credits have rolled. In a strange twist the ending credits sequence is also a great bit. All the stuff that goes between those two name rolls -I believe showbiz types refer to it as a "movie"- had some parts that didn't work as well. But considering the original DotD sagged in the middle as well maybe this was a subtle homage to the pacing of the original film by director Zack Snyder. Speaking of the beginning and end of the movie, I wanted to compliment whatever person managed to stick the start of a brand new morning into the first and final major zombie attacks. It was a literal dawn of the dead at least twice in the movie.
It was also a blood red dawn. If you ever wanted to see a movie where zombies get shot in the head then the new DotD is for you. But while there was violence galore in the new DotD there was nothing as grotesque as some of the things Tom Savini and his special effects crew brought to the original. In fact, watching the new DotD left me with the feeling the film makers were editing like crazy in order to secure an R rating. The difference between what you can get away with in a twenty five year old independent movie an a modern B movie from a major film company is still large. At least the new DotD has the nerve to go with the idea that no one is safe [when the pregnant woman played by Inna Korobkina is introduced you know the whole thing is going to turn out badly] and to use blood that remains bright red and damp for hours after it has left the human body.
What does it all mean, Charlie Brown?
As strange as it sounds, the other big selling point of zombie movies is their sub text. That's a bit like saying people read Dostoyevsky for the jokes but a good zombie movie just wouldn't be the same without it. One theme the original DotD played with was as a parody of consumer culture with zombies standing in for regular mall patrons. The idea that the zombies have lost every shred of their former humanity but still feel the need to go to the mall is a mean bit of commentary on human nature. The new DotD looses most of this angle. In a way that's too bad but the original over did the joke to such an extent that the zombies become foolish looking, leaving the viewer to wonder how the world could be destroyed by such moronic monsters.
But what the movies are about is exercises in paranoia. Fear of the unknown, fear of others, fear of the system... you name it, the movies will somehow or another be freaked out about it. Civil unrest runs throughout the original DotD. Its telling that when Peter [Ken Foree] is fortifying their hideaway he isn't concerned so much much with zombies as he is with subsequent live looters who may break into the mall. In the end it isn't the zombies but rather the stupidity and anger of the survivors that doom them.
The new DotD plays with the idea of the humans being done in by in-fighting but, in a nice touch, abandons it. The new DotD movie teaches us that when faced with adversity people can put aside their differences, unite to work on a common goal, and accomplish absolutely nothing. If that isn't in keeping with the paranoid, nihilistic attitude of the best zombies movies I don't know what is.
The late 1960's to mid 1970's were a paranoid time in the history of America. 2004 finds America once again at least as paranoid. Whether or not things are better or worse all depends upon how you look at things but the common perception of life at the moment is one of paranoia and fear. Considering the current atmosphere it's not surprising that DotD could not only be re-made but still be relevant. I'm happy to see movies this odd being made but I'm not too thrilled about living in a climate that serves as an inspiration for end of the world zombie films.
Questions, comments and whatnot can be sent to gleep9@hotmail.com. Aah, zombies! Run back to either the Third Movie or Main page to escape!