How much do you really know about zombie logic? Every horror genre has its fans; slasher flicks, poorly-lit German vampire films, even those kitschy '60s B-movies with the eight-headed swamp things. But me, I like zombie movies. A lot.
And I really like George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the sequel to his classic Night of the Living Dead. For a movie about blue zombies bleeding orange blood, it's a surprisingly human film, riffing on consumerism and the nature of fear while maintaining a body count that'd make Wes Craven blush. And the zombie logic in the original is, well, virtually flawless.
When you make a zombie movie, you have to make a couple choices; whether the zombies are the arms-out, rigor-mortis-ridden slowpokes of classic zombie films, or move at more human speeds, as they did in last year's excellent 28 Days Later. You have to decide whether the zombification process is gradual, or immediate. You have to spell out exactly what the zombies' motivation is going to be. And, in a post-Romero world, you have to figure out how you're going to work the blood 'n' guts vs. human drama equation. You can't just make zombies do anything. There's a system. This is "zombie logic."
The new Dawn fails the zombie logic test. Which makes it a bad zombie movie.
The first zombification we see in Dawn of the Dead happens within the first five minutes of the film, when Ana (Sarah Polley) loses her husband to the bite of a neighbor girl. The result? Instant zombie. But throughout the rest of the movie, the zombie process is drawn out, leaving room for a lot of deliberation about gunshots to the head and other zombie movie staples. You can't just alter the swiftness of the transmogrification because it's convenient to the plot. That's not how zombies work.
And the zombies go all kinds of speeds, without any real explanation for the change. And though some zombies seem like undead killing machines, the others seem completely disinterested in all humans, despite the fact that zombies need flesh to live. You can't argue with fact, people. And they screwed it up.
Oh yeah, and the human drama thing. The reason the original Dawn of the Dead is the best zombie movie ever is that it presented four characters you actually wanted to watch survive. All the decisions they make are based on survival, and there's not a scene in the movie that doesn't help support Romero's ideas about life and death. There's no motivation for anything anybody does in the new Dawn, but you hardly end up caring, since every single character (save for Ving Rhames, who finds new and exciting ways to say "damn!" in every movie) finds a way to annoy.
Leaving well enough alone the plot (I imagine the filmmakers sitting around thinking "Hey, let's find a way to totally not mention the fact that this movie is supposed to have backstory!"), the mall (so totally anonymous, unlike Pennsylvania's own Monroeville Mall, the site of the original), the decision-making ("Hey, we can't go this one way, let's trap ourselves in a mall!"), the limp dialogue, the tacked-on ending, and the incredibly wasted potential of a zombie baby and a chainsaw van, there's really not much left to say about Dawn of the Dead. As a run-of-the-mill action movie, it's pretty OK, but as a horror flick, there's just no need for it.
Rent the original. Now there's some zombie logic.
