Thursday, October 26, 2006

Dawn of the Dead

(2004) *****


I was so completely unenthused about the remake of Night of the Living Dead that when this one came out, I entered the theater expecting to be completely underwhelmed and more anxiously anticipating whatever else I was going to do that night than I was the movie.

10 minutes in, I was riveted.

It bears only passing resemblance to the movie on which it is based, mostly due to its identical setting. The tone is completely different and once you accept that and let the new Dawn be what it is without comparing it to the standard of the original it will, in fact, rock your face off. Look at me. Look at my face. It's gone. I have no face. This movie fucking rocked it off.

Octo and I shared the sentiment recently that the worst terror is terror in the daylight. I saw the blue sky and the high sheet of clouds peering over the Hewitt murders in TCM:B and marveled how out of place such suffering seemed on such a gorgeous day.

Minutes after we first get dropped in the middle of the storm, there's a wide aerial shot of the city, the air pulsing with the sound of a thousand car alarms, explosions billowing every 20 blocks or so. And all I could think of was a thousand gravitational centers of calamity --- a thousand spots where the violence flared up so heavily, it had become a beacon, drawing in even more violence from the fringes. To paraphrase Alan Moore, "everything bad within 1 mile suddenly found itself heading towards that colossal explosion without knowing why."

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