Dawn of the Dead (2004)
| State of body | Eaten alive by nostalgic fans of original film. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected once. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | Subject failed to wear protective clothing in hazardous environment. |
I’m not exactly sure when I became a zombie movie fan. It was probably just after seeing Peter Jackson’s “Braindead”, by which point I felt I could happily cope with anything that any other zombie movie could throw at the screen. Before that, I’d always been a bit of a coward when it came to the Horror genre – I never read Steven King books (professing scorn for his prose, despite not having read it) or saw the Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween or Friday the 13th films, or any of the other mainstream thrills ‘n’ chills stuff. It may have been my reaction, as a 13-year-old, to seeing Poltergeist. I got the heebie-jeebies for almost a year after that; I made up little rules for myself: floorboards that couldn’t be stepped on, and I couldn’t have my eyes closed when the second hand ticked past the 12, until after 9:00pm every night. Bargains to stop the clown-monster killing me.
Anyway, Braindead was a bit of a revelation. It was cheerfully gory and more thrilling than scary, and I enjoyed it a whole bunch. When I saw the Night, Dawn and Day of the Dead films for sale on video, cheap, I snapped them up, having read a number of articles proclaiming these films to be rather good.
And good they were. I was surprised at how seriously they treated their subject matter, and the ruthless intelligence behind the scripts, however occasionally mediocre the actors, direction, and dialogue. All these forgivable: this was Ideas Horror at work. Metaphor oozing from every pore.
Particularly good was “Dawn of the Dead”. So I was by parts intrigued and wary when I heard that it was being remade. I wasn’t going to see it – the reviews didn’t indicate anything special – but when Anna and I went to the cinema, the Harry Potter session was full, and the other choices – The Day After Tomorrow, The Punisher, Van Helsing, Raising Helen – were even less appealing.
This isn’t a review of the film, but a list of ways in which I’d change it, so I’m going to skip over the usual plot synopsis and assume you’ve seen it. Likewise, I’ll only briefly touch on the bits that I liked, and concentrate mostly on things I thought could have been improved.
Generating Tension
Firstly, there are the usual problems of zombie films. Despite the obvious danger inherent in being bitten by a zombie, none of the characters take the opportunity to change clothes for something more bite-resistant (and they’re in a shopping mall, so they have even less excuse than usual). Many of them persist in going from place to place alone. Several times, they will enter a new area quietly, when it would make more sense to make lots of loud noises while they are still close to the safety of a lockable door, or have lots of clear space around them for shooting zombies. As usual, this kind of stupidity caused me to get irritated at them and want them to die.
I understand that the film-makers may have been aware of all these problems, but decided to go ahead anyway. Responses to these criticisms might include that if everyone is swathed from head to foot in bulky clothing, they become harder to distinguish from one another, and the viewer disengages from them to an extent, and no longer fears for them. Most of the scenes where the characters split up are early in the film, when they’ve just entered the mall: perhaps this can be forgiven, if not understood. And finally, if the characters behaved excessively cautiously, it would slow the film down.
Point. Counter-point. Point. Firstly, the characters would only have to swathe themselves in heavy clothing when they’re exploring somewhere dangerous, which would highlight the difference between those dangerous moments and the safer, relaxed ones (and especially give opportunities for characters to be caught without their protective gear, making their situation even more perilous: there’s nothing quite like giving the audience a safety net and then taking it away). The heavy clothing would allow the characters to potentially escape even if one or two zombies had them in their clutches: it allows closer interaction between the protagonists and the antagonists, and the tension of stripping off the heavy layers to see if any bites managed to penetrate.
Secondly, splitting the characters up is far more effective if a little more effort is put into their motivation for doing so. I’m thinking, in particular, of the scene early on in which Michael (the nice guy) goes off to the sporting goods store, finds the door unlocked, goes inside, sees signs of a fracas, hears a noise, and still goes to investigate (armed with a croquet mallet – his exchange of his crowbar with the croquet mallet, incidentally, looking like a strangely lame homage to a similar scene in Pulp Fiction) and is apparently surprised to see a zombie (OK, maybe he’s paralyzed with fear or disgust). Meanwhile, another zombie comes out of nowhere (unless I missed that bit) and attacks the other people waiting at the fountain, and we have the usual bit with inexperienced-person-ineffectually-wielding-gun. Oh, and later, we have the not-knowing-about-safety-catches bit, I think. Or I may be confusing that with the first film.
A more pressing motivation to go hunting through the store alone, might be if there was (say) a child or a pet that initially accompanies the characters, but runs off and has to be found: the characters are driven to panic at the thought of a zombie getting to them first, and so split up and are overly hasty – but still aware of the possibility of zombies, and not just standing there when they see one (unless, y’know, fear or disgust). Or just cut that scene altogether: it doesn’t add a great deal to the plot, and they could then have put in one of the bits that they clearly cut out of the mid-section – like the bit in which they show the red-headed woman forming a relationship with the young security guard, and getting protective about the dog.
Finally, the going-into-unknown-areas bit. I’m talking about when they go into the underground carpark, in particular. We’re lead to believe that this bit doesn’t connect directly to the outside, or there would be zombies everywhere down there. Upon entering, the characters could make a great deal of noise: draw the zombies to them, gun them down as much as possible, and shut the door on the rest. Open the door later, and repeat. This is perhaps a more debatable point. It would certainly be better to kill one zombie at a time rather than face them all at once, but given that they would only be able to kill one before the sound alerted the others, making lots of sound while the characters are relatively safe seems a smart move.
And again, this isn’t necessarily a tension-killer. They make a sound: the zombies rush at them; they kill them all. Then they go in, feeling perhaps a little overly cocky, only to find a deaf, crippled or partially immobilized zombie biting at them. We can make a story of what happened in the carpark before our heroes got there: perhaps there’s a zombie locked in a car boot; the zombie we see in the rafters was someone who climbed up there but got bitten as he climbed. Much opportunity for grim humour.
Life in the Mall
I liked the scenes of life at the mall best, but they did kill the tension, which is why (I suspect) this bit feels choppy: there have clearly been some character development bits chopped out.
The characters hang out on the roof and shoot zombies who resemble personalities. They speculate on what is to happen; and they bicker. They count their supplies and discover what has happened to the rest of the world. More people arrive on a truck, all of whom are doomed as they are clearly secondary characters.
There are some effective moments early on, when the security guards are in charge. However, the security guard tension defuses in a rather half-hearted kind of way. The characters should stay enemies throughout, or have a better reason for starting to trust each other. My preference would be for the former: the main characters are good enough not to shoot the security guards out of hand, but the reverse isn’t necessarily true, and the tension between the two groups should have exploded towards the end: perhaps with the escape of the security guards leading to the letting-in of the zombies, leading to a premature break-out in the vans (and, given that there are two vans, the security guards could take one van and the good guys the other).
The arrival of the second group should have included at least one character that could change the existing dynamic between the characters, but they have merged with the background almost as soon as they’ve arrived (and had their obligatory introduction). The standard approach – which I’m glad they avoided – would be for the second group of arrivals to be a military presence (or another, superficially competent group), who would then take over, suggest raping the women, be escaped from, and then killed. But they’d already done that with the security guards (and avoided the latter bit by having them inexplicably changing over to good guys in the last third of the film).
The Escape
We never get a good explanation of why the escape is necessary: they even make a point of this in the script, by having the sarcastic guy be the doubter therefore making his position invalid. I think they needed a more pressing reason to have to leave the mall: they have plenty of food, and have no reason to think the zombies will stay mobile and dangerous forever. “28 Days Later…” deals with this issue, but I think it’s a fairly obvious point anyway: they should have confronted it. A simple approach would be for them to realize the mall was attracting more and more zombies, and that they would eventually break the door down through sheer force (the approach taken, approximately, by “The Day of the Triffids”), or a recognition that the power to the mall was running out in a matter of days.
Their A-Team style bus modification was cute, but the escape did seem poorly planned (though they were rushed). The bus segments had very little tension or excitement, and I think the reason was just that they lacked cleverness: even rushed, they might have managed some kind of pre-prepared distraction to get most of the zombies somewhere else – a home-made bomb, set off using the walkie-talkies. And the zombies were always very close at hand: if they’d been left further behind there could have been more opportunities for the buses to stop (say, to clear obstructions). I was reminded of “The Wages of Fear” for this bit, and the comparison was not favourable.
Finally, end did seem weak (notwithstanding the Blair-Witch coda). They drive, they lose most of the people, they get to the boat, the boat goes. This whole section needed inventions and reverses: perhaps they arrive and find all the yachts gone, or another group getting ready to leave too, or… well, something.