Dawn of the Dead: Timelessly Intelligent

At its best, Dawn of the Dead doesn't feel scripted. Its opening moments feature a television studio in pandemonium. It's here that it feels less like a scene from a movie, more like a bunch of different people from different walks of life actually try (and might I add, fail) to think up a solution to a dire, desperate, and hopelessly unfamiliar scenario. For all of its merits, Romero's Night of the Living Dead plays like yesterday's news, though much of this sentimentality is by design. Dawn of the Dead, a separate story set in the same universe, manages to feel far more modernized, immediate, and graspable because of its intentions. No, this isn't merely because it's shot in Technicolor. Do you have a shopping addiction? You're not the first, and Dawn of the Dead won't let you or others like you off the hook easy, whether you're twenty years old or eighty. Perhaps it feels current because virtually every zombie movie made today has ripped structural and social pages from its playbook. There's something a tad unreal about seeing familiar tropes in a film and knowing that you're watching the movie that popularized those tropes in the first place. Dawn of the Dead will be very familiar to modern-day viewers, but only because every zombie movie after it was ripping it off, for good reason.

Most of this movie takes place inside a shopping mall, a brilliant setting in more ways than one. It's a big, complex playground where no two stores are the same, big enough to raise never-ending possibilities, and yet small enough to feel claustrophobic. Different elements of the mall, things like escalators and water fountains, are used intelligently, practically, and satirically. I hate shopping, and call it preaching to the choir if you will, but the shots that Dawn of the Dead takes at our consumer society are brutal. I can only imagine if such a movie had been made for the first time today. The comparisons of zombies to shoppers are not lost on me.

This movie is an eerie one, but it's also subtly funny, a brilliant stroke of satire that doesn't stop at mere statements. Instead, it mines these ideas for bitter laughs aplenty. It's more or less one long wash cycle that goes something like this: discover something new about the mall for our heroes to use to their advantage, have a close encounter with the undead of one kind or another, shoot and run, and then discover something else; rinse and repeat. Its bigger, primary story arcs are more patient. You may wonder where the story went, only for Dawn of the Dead to show up again with some new, macabre development walking hand-in-hand with some new, layered critique that ties it all up with a nice, overpriced red bow. In any universe, watching a man desperately try to check his blood pressure at one of those mall machines while being swarmed by zombies is scathing enough.

Still, its ambitions sometimes outrun the confines of its story, and the one thing about Dawn of the Dead that doesn't work for me is its final third, a big, slow-burning setpiece shootout that bites off more than it can chew. This movie has a need to be an action movie on top of every other aspect it tosses in the frying pan, and its bigger, louder moments featuring motorcycles zooming through a shopping mall come across less as a part of its story, more as a need to include some obligatory action sequences. While the final forty minutes of Dawn of the Dead may be a lot of fun, neither of the two previous acts play into it in any meaningful way. Nevertheless, that's not to detract from what this film accomplishes. This is easily one of my favorite post-apocalyptic movies, an unholy blend of satire and horror that will laugh with you one moment and then chew off your arm the next. For what it's worth, it'll probably find a way to laugh at that, too.

Dawn of the Dead remains a wonderfully-staged and eerily intelligent horror movie forty-seven years later, nothing less than a tentpole of modern-day post-apocalyptic fiction. It also has proved to be a, pun intended, timelessly biting satire with a wickedly subtle sense of humor. Move aside, Amazon; you've got competition for the biggest killer of the shopping mall. It works wonderfully on both fronts, and the satire never detracts from the horror, nor vice versa. Its blood and gore may be tame by today's standards, at least on paper, but there remains an eerie weight to watching a movie and knowing that it was the first to popularize all of the tropes you see in other, newer movies like it. Dawn of the Dead was a lot more than just one of the first days that the walking dead walked the Earth and got noticed, and one need look no further than its more-than-capable cast of characters and brilliantly-used mall setting to know that. Though zombie movies have upped the ante on graphic violence since 1978, some of the grimmer aspects of this movie inspired a moral panic when this film was first released. Of course, we'd call those elements good filmmaking today. Maybe that's an us problem, but in no way does it detract from the richness of a movie that, though it may be about the walking dead, has ironically stood the test of time and lived.

Dawn of the Dead - 9/10

Matthew 6:19-21