Dawn of the Dead
Strangers take refuge in a mall during a zombie outbreak.
Horror for Beginners
United States
Canada
France
Japan2004
Feature Film
Realism:
Supernatural
Character Focus:
Zombie Film
Babies:
Fetus
Newborn
Stillborn
Relative:
Offspring
Catastrophes:
Apocalypse
Crash
Explosion
Extinction
Famine
Fire
Infestation
Infected:
Contagious
Diseased
Screenplay:
Original Film:
Franchise Remake
Freshly dead!
Performances
Pace
Ambiance
Those coming into this unaware of the classic horror movie it remakes will have their mind blown and will fully appreciate the ride regardless. This film stands alone but honors a great legacy. Hardcore fans of George A. Romero’s work will recognize antisocial patterns of 1985’s dramatic Day of the Dead transported in shopping mall sets reminiscent of 1978’s more comedic Dawn of the Dead.
The zombies look amazing, but they run and twitch. Because our leads must survive a while for a movie to exist, the living dead are limited in number to compensate for their speed and strength. The only issue this creates, here, is that the mall isn't invaded, per say, until late in the story. It feels like a wasted gimmick at first, but the script wants to depict human conflicts instead.
Writer James Gunn is familiar with Romero’s ways. He purposely isolates the victims; a powerful ensemble cast of popular names, from the zombies for most of the runtime to force them to survive creatively, in addition to dealing with the alienation, the infection, the claustrophobia and the paranoia. He knows that the living dead are simple villains that generate rhetorical story arcs.
