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Synopsis: Early one morning, Ana (Sarah 'Ramona Quimby' Polley) wakes up in a haze of post-coital bliss to discover that her neighbour's bratty kid (or her own, I'm not quite clear on this) has decided to join the new gang-craze that's been sweeping the nation: the Zombies. After the child makes a mess of her husband/live-in-SO/whatever, Ana flees for her life, gets in the car and discovers that property values in her neighbourhood are not quite what they were the day before. She hooks up with policeman Kenneth (Ving 'In the fifth, your ass goes down. Say it.' Rhames), who is on a personal quest to hook back up with his brother. Almost immediately, he and Ana run into yet another rag-tag group (just once, I'd love one of these films to feature a coherent group who haven't a rag-tagged amongst them) of zombie holocaust survivors and make for the nearby shopping mall, where they can hole up with all of their needs met whilst they wait for rescue.
    Upon entering this mall, they encounter a triune of security guards, led by CJ (Michael 'Brother Kaufman' Kelly), who immediately take control of the situation owing to the fact that they have three guns and our survivors only have two. Or something. With forces combined into a very uneasy truce, our survivors begin to post signs on the rooftop of their mall; meet Andy (Bruce 'Fargo -- Twice!' Bohne) who is stranded in his own building and takes refuge on a nearby rooftop (in one of the movie's brilliant moves, the survivors trade messages and even play chess with Andy via erasable whiteboards and binoculars, proving that communication -- one of humanity's greatest underestimated needs -- will go on for as long as there is a way for it to); and rescue a small group of refugees who make their way through the zombies using a semi-truck (one of the refugees is Matt 'Max Headroom' Fruer', who plays his part in a quietly subdued manner that's nonetheless some of the most powerful acting in this film). Attrition slowly begins to take its toll, and finally our heroes decide that they have to make a run for the water, in the hopes that an island will provide refuge from the curse of the undead...

Commentary: Remakes almost always invite comparison with their progenitor film. It's the nature of remakes. However, after giving it careful consideration, it's clear that Ebert has said just about everything that I'd say in comparison between the two films. So I think I'm going to treat Dawn of the Dead as if it was a new entry in the zombie canon.
    Dawn of the Dead is a really good zombie film. It's not the best of our most recent crop; 28 Days Later would still place higher by about half a rotten, fetid head. However, this film has far more to do with the aforementioned movie than, say, the humourously-flawed House of the Dead as it tries to be a thinking person's survival horror movie and does manage to break convention periodically. Let's go down the points that jump out, shall we?

The Good

• Disintegration Theory
      "Only entropy comes easy."
      - Anton Chekov
  
      All things with form eventually fall apart. Most survival horror movies play with this concept only on a surface level: windows break, guns jam, groups are whittled away one by one until the Last Girl (or Boy) finds it within him/herself to make a stand that turns the tide.
      Fortunately, Dawn of the Dead seems interested in taking a deeper look at this. Everything disintegrates in the film, sometimes unnoticed under our noses; sometimes very obviously. Without the supports of a stable society to prop them up, all things fail. We start this trend at the very beginning as Ana, escaping from her house, is forced to run barefoot to her car. The window of her car is crazed as she makes her escape; then we pan overhead and watch her suburb burning. Cars plow into one another; while neighbours shoot at anything that moves from well-manicured lawns. In 'suburban paradise', it took just one morning for everything to fall into pieces.
      This trend continues. Ana fetches new shoes... from a garbage can, which to me is a very symbolic gesture. Civility is destroyed when rule of the gun is the only way to enforce structure. Characters try to cling to remnants of their past lives, using the mall's resources as anchor points, only to have those remnants turn against them. A woman dies of a zombie's bite midway through childbirth and, in a disturbing yet metaphoric moment, gives birth to the inheritor next generation: a zombie. Characters are whittled away, bit by bit. Safety is ablative; often requiring its destruction to achieve a goal, depriving the survivors of one more resource. It's very, very clear that the mall ain't gonna hold forever. The walls are closing in around the cast. There's no longer a centre to hold.
  
  
• Sensible Times, Sensible People
      "Le sense commun n'est pas si commun."
      - Voltaire
  
      A long time ago, probably as long ago as there has been storyline-based/character-driven art, writers discovered that it was much easier to stick a tag or a handle onto a given character rather than to completely flesh out said character's personality, motivations and reasons for being. For whatever reason, the horror genre has embraced this to an almost stylistic degree (though absolutely no genre is free of it), to the point where scriptwriters have actually come to believe it's a good convention to follow! In horror movies like these, convention is used to excuse absolutely pathetic, stupid behaviour (which itself is the only reason to watch half those movies, so one can laugh and laugh and laugh and then sigh and wonder why such things are committed to celluloid) on the parts of the characters.
      I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the characters in Dawn of the Dead were shaken, not stupid.     Characters go places together (and when they don't, it's because the sense of safety has gotten too pronounced. They relax... and pay for it. It makes sense, because a person can't stay on alert constantly. If nothing else, their glands would exhaust). When they face a threat from within, they actually care about long-term consequences. They have different points of view about what path to take, and often none of them are Clearly Right. When they do stupid things, they do them out of fear, frustration, need or selfishness rather than because of IITS (It's In The Script).
      Well, mostly... there are points towards the end where it looks like the script got rushed and this falls apart a little bit...
  
  
• Character Development
      "You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jelly beans."
      - Ronald Regan
  
      Tying into the above, Dawn of the Dead actually waves its hands in the direction of developing characters gradually, rather than in fits and starts (though see Paragons and Demons, below). It's not altogether successful, but for the most part you can reasonably understand why characters do the things that they do. C.J., for instance, starts off the movie as a hard-ass out for himself and ends it with him giving a damn about his group if not his fellow human. In lesser films, this would have been accomplished by a sudden character inversion (or worse, a Remember The Titans style 'stare at the other character and widen eyes, while dramatic character-changing music plays' sequence). This movie, however, takes the time to give us hints as to why the character was able to make this change. He starts the movie off damned scared and can only hold onto his courage by taking total control over his situation (plus, it seems he's the senior security guard, so he's holding onto the trappings of his old job for *ahem* security reasons, as old routines provide comfort). He's quite willing to accept suggestions from these newcomers who have upset his world, as long as they show him proper respect. Gradually he's able to accept this change into his world, though with some serious and necessary backsliding, and begin to settle into a new pattern. Tellingly, though, it seems that when given a chance to choose their own groups, the security guards will stick together (unless lured away by the hopes of finding a mate); and likewise, other pre-established groups will huddle together until dissolved by circumstance, death and entropy...
  
  
• Subverted Expectations -or- But At Least They Tried
      "Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise."
      - Alice Walker
  
      Let's face it, we're a society that knows its genre conventions. Stronger works use this by subverting them and thus keeping the reader guessing; weaker works cling to genre like a drowning man holds to a lifebuoy, ever-ready for the unexpected to swamp their ship and send them to the bottom.
      Dawn of the Dead manages to straddle the line, but falls more towards the subversion than the cling response. Characters try things, and it's not always the Smart/Psychic Boy/Girl who suggests the plans. Sometimes the plans actually work; sometimes they don't. Sometimes they work with negative consequences; sometimes they don't work and still lead to a negative outcome. You can actually find yourself surprised by what happens; most of the time you will not have to exclaim 'but there's still half an hour running time left... that can't work!'.
      In other movies, you generally can identify who will live and who will die simply by matching the characters against your handy-dandy Genre Chart. Black Guy? First to go. Screaming chick? Yeah, she's toast. Wimpy, scared fellow who freaks out and alerts the zombies to his location? Oh yeah, gone in sixty seconds. You can also often cross-reference this with the Karma Alert to be absolutely sure a character is going to be iced and often, though not always, know that his/her death will come about in a way that provides a terminal comeuppance for past bad behaviour.
      For the most part, that just doesn't happen here (though again, at the end, the writer's pen slipped a little...). For the most part, the brutality is fittingly random. Death doesn't play favourites; the universe doesn't parcel out allotments of fairness to the just. When a character is marked for death, it's in a very literal and fitting way: if they have been bitten by a zombie, their days are numbered and things can only end very, very badly for them...

The Bad

• The Shovel Principle
      "Too many divas, not enough stage."
      - Colloquialism
  
      Big problem. Big, big problem. We have more characters in this movie than the film can handle with just a running time of one hundred slender minutes. While the multitude of voices does provide one with a better perspective on what's going on in the human psyche during the end of the world, it also serves to divorce one from the proceedings. It's harder to build up sympathy for a given character except in momentary sound bites when we flash from one to another with gay abandon. Having this many characters helps to tell a fuller story, but it then fails to draw us into that story. It also provides less time to finish resolving characters' interactions, which is a major flaw with the film.
  
  
• Da Rulez
      "In spite of their importance we fear there are sections of the Official Rules that are somewhat less than exhilarating. So don't bother your pretty wits about them; simply race through the few pages assembled here and we guarantee that you'll end up knowing more about baseball than any man worth looking at."
      - A Housewife's Guide to Baseball
  
      One of the fundamentals of horror is uncertainty. One of the fundamentals of uncertainty is never knowing if you're right or not when you try to figure out How The Monster Works. Even terrible horror movies often understand this on a gut level; this is why they rely on ho-hum surprises and spring-loaded cats jumping out to musical stings as they attempt to surprise the viewer and make them believe that UNCERTAINTY and FEAR was around every corner (then usually flub it up by providing too many clues as to when something's going to Landshark out at you...)! Often times, these movies try to gild themselves in a patina of thoughtfulness by having characters go on and on about how the horror du jour works; but letting the audience understand things is the worst possible way to sustain horror! If you must explain yourself, you have to make sure it doesn't matter that the audience knows the truth!
      Unfortunately, our ingenue Ana manages to suss out how zombification is transmitted from zombie to human; and helpfully assures everyone that 'if someone dies without being bitten, they won't change!'.
      Well thanks for the heads-up, Ana. We'll just stop feeling nervous any time a dead character might rise and seek the warm flesh of the living. Now this situation could have been salvaged if, oh, Ana had been wrong. Wait ten minutes, have someone die without a bite, everyone turns their back and feels safe... and suddenly s/he rises up and runs after them for a juicy bite of Cast-Member... now that would have thrown some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt into the audience.
      Just my two cents.
  
  
• Paragons and Demons
      "Happiness is the highest good, being a realization and perfect practice of virtue, which some can attain, while others have little or none of it."
      - Aristotle
  
      Tying off of The Shovel Principle, Dawn of the Dead has a bit of a problem with resolving characters' stories due to the sheer number of them in this movie. There are two ways that this can be solved: kill some off and shorthand them.
      Let's take Ana, the first character to whom we are introduced, as an example. As she is the first person we see in this movie (at least, she's the first one we see who doesn't wind up as Purina-brand Zombie Chow off-camera), we can reasonably be expected to pick her up as our audience identification character. The movie certainly gives us reason to empathize with the travails of this woman: we get to watch the total destruction of all she loves and cherishes in the opening shots and then follow her as she valiantly tries to Keep It Together in what follows. When she's finally in the mall and has a minute to sit down, she breaks down as almost anyone would be expected to under the circumstances, only to have her attention called elsewhere, forcing her to put her feelings back in the Big Bottle of Repression.
      That's a good start, isn't it? You'd expect this to turn into some powerful character building, wouldn't you? If so, you'd be sadly mistaken. That's it for Ana's emotional growth. From that point on, she's the Stable and Balanced Healer of the Party who dispenses sage advice and provides bridging scenes so other characters can half a few minutes in the sun before their emotional crap gets aired. Ana becomes, in short, a Paragon of Virtue rather than a real woman who has real problems and emotional hangups about the whole 'end of human society as we knew it' thing. She thus becomes that much less interesting as a person. This phenomenon happens to many of the characters, sometimes moving them towards a 'fixed form' far too quickly. The Sardonic Man of Leisure (such a non-character I can't even remember his name) almost immediately calcifies without giving us the faintest glimpse of a real human being within. Had the movie restricted itself to a smaller cast, these problems might not have existed.

The Ugly

• The False Ending
      "There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning."
      - Louis L'Amour
  
      Could someone here please phone up Hollywood? Please, for me? I'd like it if everyone rang up Tinsel town and asked them to please learn how to end their movies. We had two endings to Dawn of the Dead: the one before the credits, which was downbeat, held faint promise and let the audience decide for itself what happened.
      Then we have the one they showed during the credits, where they nail down exactly what happened. Geez louise, uncertainty is often better! The reason I put this under 'Ugly' is because it smacks very much of studio interference. I'll be curious to see what comes out on the DVD's commentary track...

Moments to Watch For

• The zombie baby. Makes you wonder, when you're ripping off Dead Alive...
• The spring-loaded dog, who actually becomes important to the plot.
• Celebrity zombie deathmatch!

Recommended: Yes. Not quite up to the standards of its predecessor, but hangs together all on its own.

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