OK, so I just saw the remake of Dawn of the Dead. I consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur of the zombie genre. And as such, I really enjoyed it.

But. There are two things that bother me about the remake. And I'm here to whine about them.

1. The remake is scary, but not funny. This is sort of the opposite of the original, which was funny but not scary. Sure, Night of the Living Dead was terrifying, but the original Dawn of the Dead (which is its sequel) was intentionally stupid. Romero wanted the movie to be comic-book-like, and was very successful in the respect. The new version seems to owe a lot to 28 Days Later. It is scratchy, jumpy, and all-over scary, and it's better than 28 Days, but it lacks a lot of the humor of the original Dawn.

2. The remake cuts out the major theme of the original. Namely, that we are becoming mindless drones of consumerism. According to the original, the zombies have "Seemingly little or no reasoning power, but some retain basic skills that they learned in their former life. These creatures are nothing but pure, motorized instinct." Which is why they are all crowding around the mall. In the original, one character asks, "Why do they come here?" Another responds, "Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives." These rotting corpses only have the capacity to do one thing, and they want to shop til they drop. Of course, now that they're zombies, they want to shop for brains and guts.

I don't know why they chose to downplay this theme. Also, while the characters in the remake do take advantage of being sequestered in a mall, they don't show signs of pure joy about it, as do the original characters. The original characters are thrilled to have all of this stuff to themselves, and it is obvious (and once again, funny). Plus, it's an important part of the end-of-the-world/zombie genre, as evidenced in The Omega Man. In that movie, sure, Charlton Heston has his guns, but he also has his groovy apartment, his bodacious hi-fi, and his top-shelf booze. When everything has gone to hell and it's all there for the taking, one must loot. It's the only joy left.

Nonetheless, I did enjoy Dawn of the Dead thanks in a large part to Sarah Polley, who is beautiful and amazing. As always.
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