Dawn of the Dead

PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 3/19/04)

Worshippers at the gore-soaked altar of George A. Romero are advised to get up off their knees long enough to check out this Revision of the Living Dead, quite likely the most crowd-pleasing zombie movie ever made. For those who can't stomach a feat of that gut-chomping caliber, please step over to the Eternal Sunshine ticket line and forget I said a thing.

Dawn of the Dead's intense, extended opener is as strong a hook as any found on a White Stripes album, beginning with Wisconsin nurse Ana (Sarah Polley) peacefully curled up in bed next to her husband one moment, running for her life from him the next, flying through bathroom doors and speeding away from a burning, swarming, chaotic zomburbia, all in about, oh . . . four minutes. A crafty credit sequence follows, interspersed with a press conference, where an official admits total ignorance to the rampantly spreading plague that is killing everyone, then reanimating them as mindless drones who cannibalize other people. Unlike the lumbering archetypes of the genre, however, these suckers are fast!

Ana soon bands together with a stoic policeman (Ving Rhames) and a gang of other live folk, and they take refuge in Dawn's centerpiece stage, a local shopping mall. In Romero's 1979 original of the same name (a brilliant cult sequel to his 1968 standard of zombie quintessence, Night of the Living Dead), only four survivors actually hole up in the mall, leaving plenty of screenwriting room for some biting social commentary about the shallowness of consumer culture; the protagonists get comfortable and stay comfortable trapped inside with all their free products, making them no better than the undead hordes outside.

2004's Dawn of the Dead barely attempts to regurgitate that important and still-relevant satire (how can it, with all the product placement?), spending its energies instead on instant gratification through inventive carnage (e.g., a zombie mother gives birth to a zombie child). For that matter, the new Dawn lacks the fleshed-out character development, sheer flair, and suspense that made last year's 28 Days Later stick to the ribs. That aside, former video director Zack Snyder's reimagining of hell on earth, as liberally adapted by James Gunn, is still an amply entertaining tale of survival terror, fully realizing the epicness of Romero's vision by infecting every wide-angled overhead shot with as many computer-generated cadavers as possible, and bridging tense moments with a laugh-aloud, plucky wit. Not bad for a movie as disposable as the popcorn it helps spill on theater floors.

—Aaron Hillis