fter starting her nursing job at the crack of dawn and spending the day fulfilling doctors' requests, all Ana (Sarah Polley) wants to do is go home to her husband and daughter and spend a leisurely evening in front of the television. Though her night seems pleasant enough, she awakens the next morning to the horrifying sight of her daughter eagerly chomping away at her husband's jugular.
After locking out the feral, jaundiced and aggressively violent girl, she struggles to help her husband, and tries to call for an ambulance. The phone lines are busy, and Ana finds herself struggling with an apparently revived version of her husband, who has one desire—to feast on her still-living flesh. Ana successfully races away in her car, but quickly discovers that her home is not the only place that's gone topsy-turvy.
Car wrecks and injured (or dead) bodies are strewn on lawns, street corners and highways, and her neighbors are either defending themselves from attacking undead, or becoming them. When Ana is besieged by a still-living attacker looking to steal her car, she drives off the road, down a ravine and across the path of Kenneth (Ving Rhames), a cop who is also trying to find safe haven.
The duo stumble across another group of survivors, including Michael (Jake Weber), Andre (Mekhi Phifer) and his girlfriend, Luda (Inna Korobkina), and they band together to find sanctuary from the growing hordes of zombies. Encountering light resistance, the survivors move to a local mall and begin trying to make sense of the impending "zombie holocaust" that escalates outside the building.
The question becomes not whether they will survive an attack of zombies, but whether their world can be effectively enclosed in the folds of their commercial refuge. If it can't, how can they venture out into a world filled with flesh-eating maniacs?
Commercial filmmaker Zack Snyder directs this remake of the 1979 George Romero classic, and updates his predecessor's formulas with a script by Scooby-Doo screenwriter James Gunn.
A worthy successor wakes the Dead
Many fans of Romero's original faced the prospect of a remake with serious trepidation, and rightly so: Far too many "classics," horror or otherwise, have been rejiggered for modern audiences with little of their spirit left intact. Thankfully, James Gunn's screenplay treads lightly on Romero's legacy, and creates a film that ups the ante on gore while retaining the original's sense of characters and story.
Much credit has to go to the cast, which is anchored (if not exactly led) by Sarah Polley's Ana. A blond female protagonist as much in the historical tradition of slasher-movie leading ladies as she is a modified redux of the first film's Francine Parker (Gaylen Ross), Polley (The Sweet Hereafter) admirably keeps the proceedings grounded throughout the film's ever-exaggerating circumstances, and gives twentysomethings a heroine who's actually a bit smarter than the pneumatic co-eds who are inevitably destined to meet their fate at the business end of a killer's weapon of choice.
While Polley gives Dawn of the Dead acting cred for doubters of the genre's usually shallow stable of talent, Jake Weber (TV's The Mind of the Married Man) emerges as the film's true hero, lending intelligence to his portrayal of Michael. Where most films would strap a bunch of archetypal characters into the grinding wheels of plot convention and evoke drama by pitting them against one another, Gunn creates a real leader—an even-tempered, responsible protagonist—in Michael, and Weber knows when to ease off the gas and give the audience a bit of human drama amid the abundant gore.
Director Snyder foregoes the self-awareness and irony of recent entries of the genre, and makes Dawn of the Dead a truly thrilling ride for both fans of the original and uninitiated theater-goers looking for a scary time at the movies. The pacing is intensified from the first film, skipping much of the expository development that gave Romero's version a stronger sense of impending dread, and wastes no time arousing screams from its audience. From the moment Ana crashes into her bathroom, knocking down the shower curtain and collapsing in the tub to escape her zombie husband, the film throttles forward, twisting just enough familiar moments from the first film to keep fans new and old on their toes.
