this past saturday i saw dawn of the dead. first impressions: good movie. it entertained me and i enjoyed it. you know, i kinda want to go see it again already...a movie hasn't done that to me in a long time. i'm going to give it to you straight, though...i've yet to see the original. i own the original, but i haven't watched it yet. the reason i got it, though, was because i saw the new one this past saturday. i liked the new one enough to get the old, and that should say a lot about it.
i'm not totally ignorant of zombie movies, however. i have seen both night of the living dead offerings (1968 and 1990). i'm a fan of the romero style film. i've played resident evil, silent hill, eternal darkness, and a few other games that are grounded/inspired by romero's work. needless to say, zombies are entertaining in my book. this movie gave a nice little update to the slow-moving, brain-hungry movies-about-the-undead scene.
ok, into the movie itself...the action starts almost immediately and i like that about this movie. the story starts about ten minutes before the credits even roll. after the main character is introduced and you learn a little about her, it goes downhill fast. next thing you know it's hell on earth and no one knows what's going on (not the viewer, though...i was enthralled by the chaos shown on the screen). my word of choice in describing this movie is intense. it may not be the scariest thing i've ever seen, but it's intense as anything i've seen. every time a person was potentially available to zombies (by going outside or whatever), i was pretty much white-knuckled. you get the feeling that something bad's going to happen around every corner. it doesn't...all the time, at least.
the cinematography is very well-suited for this type of movie. it mixed close-up shots with wide-angle stuff to give the viewer an idea of the scope of the problem. for example, the camera is zoomed in on one of the characters and the pulls out so you can see how big of a problem they're facing...and it's a BIG problem. in the opening sequence, one of my favorite parts of the whole movie is a helicopter shot. you're looking down on a neighborhood at something like a 3/4 view from way up. it's a pretty unique sequence.
once the title and the opening credits begin, snippets of info about the crisis are shown via news conference clips and interviews. basically the idea is no one knows what's going on, but it sucks. no one has answers and there are a lot of questions. the ending credits were similar in that they provided a sort of epilogue to the movie. while the credits rolled, clips of home video came up to show what the characters found after the movie ended (what they find at their destination).
in terms of scariness, this movie is decent. it has a few make-you-jump points; it definitely made jump. it's not all serious, though. there's a nice amount of humor in the movie to break up those intense moments. at this point i really can't say much more about the movie...i feel like i've repeated myself enough already. of course there are areas in the movie where it may be a little hard to suspend disbelief, but that's true with almost every horror movie. i think it's a requirement to have some actions by characters that no real person would ever do (ex. opening a door when you know there's a zombie on the other side...keep the door closed, zombies aren't smart enough to open doors). ok, the last thing i'm gonna say is thank you 28 days later for coming up with speedy zombies. the zombies in dawn of the dead don't move with the creepy jerkiness that the viral zombies had in 28 days later, but they at least move like a person does...running and all that. at one point it looked like a zombie was running the 100-meter dash. that was kinda funny. anyway, my score for the movie is a nice 9.
Posted by godemperor at March 24, 2004 04:57 PM