[6]

Zack Snyder (300, Man of Steel) made his feature directorial debut with this remake of George Romero’s 1978 classic zombie sequel. This time around the rag-tag team of survivors holed up in a mall during the zombie apocalypse includes Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter) and Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction), but you don’t get to know either of them nearly as well as you got to know the characters in Romero’s original version. James Gunn’s (Guardians of the Galaxy) screenplay throws in too many extra characters and makes next-to-nothing of the wonderful ‘living in a capitalist paradise’ subtext intrinsic to the movie’s setting. Snyder has the cinematic chops to execute scenes with style and well-choreographed thrills, but Romero still wins in the departments of atmosphere and dread. The cinematography is too contrasty and monochromatic for my taste. It’s an easy movie for me to pick on, but mostly just because it fails to measure up to its predecessor in so many ways. It’s an entirely watchable flick, though. The best scene involves the first time I’ve ever seen a pregnant zombie give birth.