Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 18, 2004, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
What does it say that a number of the major horror remakes in the last couple of years have been better than most of the original genre fare? Perhaps that studios don’t feel the need to be as controlling creatively when they’re working with a presold property, or maybe just that we’ve lucked out and seen these projects handed to filmmakers who respect the films they’re revamping. In any case, Dawn of the Dead joins The Ring and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as an update that both honors its source and emerges as an effective horror film in its own right. It won’t make anyone forget George A. Romero’s original, but then it doesn’t really try to.
Rather than focus on a quartet of survivors of a plague that has turned everyone around them into flesh-ravenous ghouls, new Dawn director Zack Snyder and screenwriter James Gunn take a less personal approach; their theme is how humanity as a whole responds to a crisis. The inspiration seems less Romero than John Carpenter films like The Thing and Assault on Precinct 13, in which the characters are defined mostly by how they react to extreme circumstances. The setting remains the same, though: a large shopping mall where the still-living take refuge. The heroine is Ana (Sarah Polley), whose job as a nurse allows the filmmakers to drop hints about the plague to come in the opening minutes, and whose early scenes deftly sketch a safe, conventional life that is violently shattered. The first manifestation of the zombie outbreak is truly chilling, as are subsequent scenes in which Ana drives through the mini-apocalypse that her suburban neighborhood has become. Attaching his camera to Ana’s car as she drives through the vividly staged mayhem, Snyder achieves the effect of a first-person video game come to life—more successfully, in fact, than such official games-to-movies as Resident Evil and House of the Dead.
Ana soon encounters ex-Marine-turned-cop Kenneth (Ving Rhames) and joins him and a few other survivors at the Crossroads Mall, where they have to placate a trio of hostile security guards and later take in several more refugees. Unlike Romero’s movie, this Dawn doesn’t go for satire of the consumer culture (though I love the name of the coffee shop that serves as a sort of home base: Hallowed Grounds), nor, as noted above, does it explore its people in a great deal of depth. Rather, it places a variety of different types in an ultra-tense situation and examines the choices they make. One element that both Romero’s Dawn (indeed, all of his Dead films) and this one ignore is the issue of race; the redneck guards don’t make an issue of the fact that Kenneth and Andre (Mekhi Phifer) are black, nor is the interracial relationship of Andre and his very pregnant wife Luda (Inna Korobkina) commented on. Basic humanity is the core theme here, and Gunn finds room for a number of small, personal touches. His best invention is Andy (Bruce Bohne), a guy stranded on a neighboring rooftop who develops a long-distance “relationship” with the mall group.
Lest one think this Dawn is a tract on human nature, let me hasten to point out that its main aim is to shock and scare, and it does so more explicitly than any other R-rated studio feature I can think of. There are moments here (like the celebrity-shooting scene—you’ll know it when you see it) when I thought I had been transported back to the days of the wide unrated release, and had me questioning whether the MPAA has simply thrown up its hands on the violence issue in the wake of The Passion of the Christ. David LeRoy Anderson’s makeup FX are wholly convincing and as bloody as any zombie fan could want; whatever else one can say about this studio remake, no one can claim that it has been sanitized for the masses. (The fast-moving creatures, in fact, are more reminiscent of the “infected” in 28 Days Later, though the similarity isn’t too objectionable given how much that movie owed to Romero in the first place.) Die-hard fans of the original will also enjoy a mall store named “Gaylen Ross” and cameos by Tom Savini, Scott Reiniger and Ken Foree (who, in a nice touch, gets to repeat his signature line from the ’79 movie).
The main cast, meanwhile, is convincing down the line, with Polley an instantly and consistently sympathetic heroine, Rhames making his man-of-few-words role work for him and Phifer effectively conveying his increasingly conflicted father-to-be. Best of all is Wendigo’s Jake Weber, as a soft-spoken salesman who slowly but surely reveals a no-nonsense survival instinct. The relationships that develop between these people pay off as circumstances become increasingly desperate, and lead to a final scene that feels both resonant and appropriate (though it’s undercut somewhat by crude and unnecessary shots that play under the end credits). For all but those who staunchly believe that there’s no room in the horror scene for a reinterpretation of Romero’s classic, this Dawn will have fans welcoming the fact that the dead are walking the Earth again.
