87 - Dawn of the Dead

    After a zombie epidemic sweeps the country, a group of survivors hole up in a mall.
    I’ve enjoyed the Dawn of the Dead remake since I saw it in theaters.  It’s got a punchier sense of excitement to it that the original doesn’t have.  The fast-moving dead suggest a more insurmountable threat, something much more urgently deadly than the slow burn of the slow-moving dead.  The situation isn’t just bleak - it’s hopeless.
    I noticed a few other things this time through.  First, the direction was a bit worse than I remember.  There are a few memorable shots mixed into the movie, but I realized that Snyder pads out the running time with a lot of slow-motion shots.  He likes inserting shots of bullet casings falling to the floor at the feet of the shooter.  In the past, these shots were exactly the kind of filler that they are, and I didn’t pay much attention to them.  Now that I’ve noticed them, I probably won’t be able to stop noticing it.
    The other thing is that the original played on a sense of isolation.  The larger cast in this one stops that from being an issue.  But there’s a tighter pacing to this one, and that changes the sense of the passage of time.  Sometimes I was convinced it was taking place over the space of a week or two.  There’s only a brief sequence of boredom, and even that is played pretty tightly.