The Day After the Dawn of the Dead Redux
A big fan of the original version, I and one of my sons saw the new version of Dawn of the Dead on Friday. I'll try not to include anything here that’s a spoiler, so this should be safe if you're aiming to go see it unless you want to know absolutely nothing about it until you see it.
We both enjoyed it. Not groundbreaking cinema, but it was fast-moving and reasonably well handled. Much as with the late 70's film it's a horror adventure film, though it reigned in the humor that was such a part of the earlier film. Each film had musical comedic touches, though in the original it was often over the top into goofiness, while in the new version it was more convincingly creepy and funny, as when they're working their way through the mall early on and a muzac version of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" is playing over the mall's sound system.
Keeping it at an hour and 40 minutes while giving us over twice as many would-be survivors, understandably, meant that the character sketches were much shallower, though I think they did a good job of presenting us with self-realized, human characters rather than a band of stereotypes.
It would have been fair for them to have given this film a new name, leaving perhaps an "inspired by" or "based on" nod to the earlier film, as the only strong commonalities are that the dead are rising to attack the living (hardly a concept Romero and company own by now), that the survivors seek refuge at a mall, and that one of them is pregnant. While I applaud their giving the titular original the nod they do, including recasting both special effects wiz and sometimes actor Tom Savini and Ken Foree, (with a more up to date and thorough listing of his roles here), the actor who played Peter Washington (the large, black guardsman, as fans will readily recall) for cameos, allowing the Free (albeit in a different character) to deliver his "When there's no more room in Hell..." line again, it's a sufficiently different film to merit its own title and to not be considered a remake.
As with last year’s 28 Days Later the zombies are souped-up versions, rather than the lumbering, generally dull-witted ones in Romero’s Dead movies. These attack with utter abandon and ferocity. Unlike the aforementioned British film, though, the cause is not pinned down, and as this is set in the USA firearms come into the picture far, far sooner than they did in heavily gun-controlled England.
Like 28 Days Later, they employed a visual technique to help disorient the viewer during the violent scenes. I’m not precisely sure of what’s done, and it’s likely a technique that has a name, but to me it appears as if they double or triple-print a given frame, and then skip the next one or two. Presumably this is intended to give those scenes a visual analogue of the panic the characters are feeling, as events seem to be moving in a rapid but vaguely discontinuous fashion. They might even have been blanking out every fourth or 11th or whatever frame, for all I know. (If you know, please, edify me!) What I do know is that in both films I found the technique to be a little more distracting than would warrant its use. Anything technique that snaps the first-time viewer out of his verisimilitude by calling attention to itself is something to be strongly reconsidered before leaving it in the final edit.
Should you go out to see it on the big screen, be sure to sit through the credits, as the actual ending of the film is buried in flash-scenes during them. I almost always wait through the credits, (just not those at the end of Return of the King, as I'd already felt as if I was on the verge of incontinence by the time those credits rolled) but many in the theatre got up and headed out as soon as they began to roll, and only about half of those were slow-moving enough that they caught on that things weren't quite over yet, and watched the remaining scenes while standing in the aisles.
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