Cinematical

I think you can argue about which film best captures the reality of 9/11 -- United 93 and World Trade Center each have their supporters, and they have their reasons. But, to me, another film came out of nowhere to truly capture the feel of that morning -- how the news went from casual to ominous while you ate breakfast, or how you woke to a changed world without knowing it, and the fever-pitch sense of raw-nerve terror right after as you realized something horrible was happening but didn't quite know what was going on. And worse, you didn't know what was going to happen next. Of course, that movie had no link to the reality of that morning (or, for that matter, the reality of any morning), but sitting in the theater watching Zack Snyder's 2004 re-make of Dawn of the Dead, I felt fiercely, keenly unnerved: Yeah, I remember that. Within the first ten minutes of Dawn of the Dead, Sarah Polley's Ana goes to bed in a world she knows; long shifts, 'date night' at home with her husband, bad reality shows on TV and gossip about friends. She wakes up -- as we woke up -- and all of that is gone.

Dawn of the Dead's pre-credit sequence depicts, in short order, a few moments of serene normalcy before the apocalypse comes (literally) to our door howling and blood-hungry. During the credits, civilization falls apart in a matter of hours, which we see in a montage set to the unsettling strum of Johnny Cash's 'When the Man Comes Around.' If Dawn of the Dead ended at Snyder's credit, it would still be far better than most of its horror-film peers. But Dawn of the Dead does more than just grab us; it holds on, and with a surprisingly skillful grip. It's a remake of George A. Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead, with a group of people holed up in a mall set against a zombie apocalypse, but let me be blunt and bold (and probably raise the bloodlust of Romero fanatics, a legion as numerous as their idol's undead armies). George A. Romero is to horror film as the Sex Pistols were to rock and roll: Far more influential than actually good. The original Dawn of the Dead had the advantage of originality and the shock of the new, but it's also a bit stiff -- it actually includes a pie fight set to wacky comedy music, for one example. The new one has plenty of humor (dark, gallows humor, the uneasy giggles you make when you dodge a banana peel on the way to the electric chair) but there's not a wink in it. Director Snyder plays the material with full-on ferocity, and we're swept up completely.

James Gunn is credited as the screenwriter, and his nerdy-yet-dirty approach is tonally perfect; at the same time, there were uncredited rewrites by Michael Tolkin (The Player, The Rapture) and Scott Frank (Out of Sight, Minority Report) -- both of whom have a proven capacity for sparkling dialogue and dark visions. Also, much like Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark avoided naming (and taming) its villains as vampires, the word 'zombie' is never uttered in the new Dawn of the Dead. And Gunn also makes the wise choice to actually increase the number of survivors in the remake -- which means that the film has a larger reservoir of people for us to meet, come to like and then watch die in grisly and unexpected ways.

The new Dawn of the Dead also has an iron-strong structure, with an impressive triumvirate of actors -- none of whom are stars, all of whom are excellent, which is often to be preferred. Sarah Polley's Ana gains courage under fire -- yet never loses her heart. Jake Weber's Michael may have been a job-changing slightly lost man before things went wrong, but after he's always got a good idea or a smart call at hand when it's needed. Ving Rhames's Kenneth was, and is, a tough cop who lends gravity and guts to the action as required. There are other archetypes in the film -- the jerk who comes around, the cute couple, the jerk who doesn't come around -- but the film keeps us with Ana, Michael and Jake and their interplay. (At the time of the film's release, I noted in my theatrical review that watching Polley, Weber and Rhames was one of the movie's biggest pleasures, like watching Annie Oakley, Thomas Edison and Mohammad Ali as an All-American dream team against the end of the world.) When a group of survivors are headed to the parking basement to find and activate the emergency generators, Michael asks late arrival Kenneth if he's coming with them. His response is pure b-movie badassery: "Naw." He racks the slide on his shotgun: "Y'all are coming with me." And Ana and Michael have a shell-shocked-yet-real interplay as two people trying to stay sane and human in the face of insane terror.

In a lot of ways, Dawn of the Dead plays like a grim variation on Hitchcock's Lifeboat -- dwindling resources, close quarters, the constant possibility (or, rather, probability) of immediate death. And if the social satire isn't as pointed as it was in Romero's original, the movie makes up for it with ambition and big-budget effects. Actually, the more appropriate phrase would be 'larger-budget'; in 1978, Romero had a budget of approximately $500,000 (with some lab fees and salaries deferred); the 2004 remake cost a relatively small-scale $28 million -- which it made back in approximately the first weekend of release. But while Snyder had access to modern digital tricks, they never overshadow the story. They're used to make a strong script even stronger, not to make a weak script look adequate. (I think the same cannot be said of Snyder's more expensive, less enjoyable follow-up, 300 -- and while I know I'm in the minority with that opinion, I also have the comfort of being right.)

But you can talk about archetypes and budgets and digital effects all you want: Dawn of the Dead boils down to us versus them, life versus death, order versus chaos -- with no guarantee that our heroes will win. And it's fiercely unsentimental: Survivor Glen (R.D. Reid) is asked by Ana to say a few words at an improvised funeral: "You worked at a church." "I played the organ." She persists: "Come on, you must have heard the priest say something about life and death." He still refuses: "It was a job ... I don't believe in God. I don't see how anyone could." That's what Dawn of the Dead gives us -- the death of God, the death of order, the death of death itself, the death of everything. It's a great piece of horror film making, one speaks to our fears about the new and terrifying world we live in, a bleak and thrilling piece of poetic prophecy spit through blood-stained, snarling teeth.