Olga and I went to see “Dawn of the Dead” in the cinema today. I am not a particular fan of horror movies, but this one had an excellent trailer and a lot of positive hype around it, so I decided what the hell.
Short story: this movie sucked. A lot. All of it. Completely. And it has nothing to do with me not liking the genre of horror. There was no horror in this film. There were no stanning special effects. There were no scary moments. There was not story. There was no acting. And there was no soundtrack. Actually there was nothing except for a bunch of guys and gals shooting a bunch of zombies for two hours.
Now for a long story. This film had potential. It could have been very good if it was a bit scary. And how do you make people afraid these days? It is not by showing a bunch of weirdly looking guys. It’s 21 century, there are plenty of these on the streets of big cities and people got used to them. Freaks don’t scare people anymore. It doesn’t matter how ugly they look. Instead, I think it would be better to make the audience like the main characters. When people care, it is easy to scare them. It’s when you put the characters that audience likes in danger when people get scared.
There were a lot of opportunities in this film that were lost. There was a scene when it was decided to shot a guy because he was infected, so his daughter started to cry all over the place. Who cares? Maybe they never got along in the first place. If the film showed their happy, loving and caring family for like five minutes, everyone (except for those who don’t know what a happy, loving and caring family is) in the cinema would get scared that they will actually shoot the guy. In another scene, this girl drives a truck through the crowd of zombies just to rescue the dog, which she found about 15 mintues earlier. C’mon!
Some of the people were not even properly introduced to the audience. There comes this bus and the driver, standing on the top of the roof says that there are six more people in the bus. That’s it. Later on the movie some of these new people just appear and do something. This is some bad story telling, if you ask me. But the bad story telling is all over this movie. It starts exactly as in the trailer – a girl gets infected and she just bites a piece of neck from her daddy. Then her daddy goes mad. And so it goes. There is no explanation of where this stupid virus came from or how it works or how long it takes to convert a human into a zombie or how to cure it. Nothing. The best explanation in the whole film you get is: “Shoot them in the head.”. That’s it.
Another thing that was totally wrong in this film is the sense of security. Usually, in the horror movies, main characters get into some corner surrounded by scary creatures all over the place. But they need to get out to find some food, or weapons, or to get saved, or to study the infection. This time though, main characters secured themselved in the supermarket with everything they need available. They have food, clothes, med kits, even candles for romantic dinners. They have no reason to get out of the store what so ever. How scary is this? Not at all. Accidentally, they have to drive across the street to the miliatry shop to save a dog. In that shop they have all the ammunition available for them. Hehe. Makes you think that having all these zombies around is just director’s way to save some budget on the pedestrians. :) Finally, it is realized that these people can seat in the store forever, but the movie has to go on. So what they do? Right! They decide to go to some other place on the yacht. So they take a trip to the marine. On the way half of them get eaten by zombies, and the other half leaves to the unknown territories. The end. Crap.
Just because they killed a hell of a lot zombies during the film and only because they hired Ving Rhames (Marsellus Wallace in “Pulp Fiction”) I gave this film a 3 out of 10 on IMDB.
P.S.: It appears that this film is a remake of the “Dawn of the Dead” from 1978, which I haven’t seen. But I don’t care. This fact is not going to affect my opinion about this movie.