First, a word of warning. This review contains a few heavy spoilers for George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Those of you who haven’t seen this movie are strongly urged to read no further so you won’t screw yourselves out of the unique viewing experience that movie has to offer you.

It is impossible to assess Zack Snyder's version of George A. Romero’s classic without reference to the original. This is tough for Snyder, as the original is one of the most critically acclaimed of contemporary horror movies. Having said that, one might wonder why this movie was made at all. The movie's release coincided with a recrudescence of zombies in recent popular culture, as the entertainment industries capitalized on the money-spinning potential of the undead. Moreover, the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre proved two things: to audiences and (some) critics, it demonstrated that remakes of successful horror movies don’t automatically suck, while to studio heads it proved that where there’s blood, guts and gore, there’s money. And with their images of groups of running, panicking citizens, zombie movies encapsulate the apocalyptic anxiety of a contemporary world in a more direct and horrifying way than other horror subgenre.

Snyder's Dawn of the Dead follows the fortunes of a nurse, Ana (art-house staple Sarah Polley), and a policeman, Kenneth (Ving Rhames). They soon encounter another policeman, André (Mekhi Phifer), his pregnant wife Luda (Inna Korobkina) and a white-collar hero named Michael (Jake Weber). This band grows in number when the survivors decide to seek sanctuary in a shopping mall and meet some initially hostile security guards. Before long, more survivors enter the mall, making this film much busier than its precursor. The larger number of characters gives the film a sociable atmosphere absent from the original, in which the intense alienation of the four survivors was more palpable. This larger number also provides the opportunity for a number of gruesome dispatchments, which also hinder the development of narrative, character, and theme -- at least, for those benighted horror fans that still demand such fripperies.

At its best when dealing with the claustrophobic reality of being surrounded by cannibal ghouls, Snyder's movie delivers plenty of tense action set-pieces, while upgrading Romero’s lumbering blue-skinned zombies into living dead Olympic runners who'll stop at nothing to get their hands on human flesh. Refusing to skimp on the gross-out, this Dawn delivers a series of memorable scenes that will have viewer retching. While a string of comedic moments provide some welcome light relief amidst all the horror -- for instance, the sniper who picks out living dead targets according to their resemblance to celebrities like Jay Leno and Burt Reynolds -- one can’t help craving for the carefully balanced mix of splatter humor and grim political allegory that Romero so skillfully perfected. But Snyder doesn’t seem particularly interested in making his zombies metaphors for materialism or the mall setting into a comment on consumer culture.

A fatalistic atmosphere pervades this movie. In Romero's version, two survivors escape from the mall in a chopper (this was a significant change to the original screenplay of Dawn of the Dead, in which in fact all the characters get killed). In doing so, they represent the potential of the more progressive and sensitive human beings to move 'beyond apocalypse'. The escape in Snyder's version however, which I’m not going to divulge here, gives the film a very dark tone. This movie is more brutal and pessimistic than Romero's, substituting gory nihilism for character-driven ideology critique.

One of the many interesting aspects of Romero's movie was that in some scenes the zombies -– pathetically defenseless against a gung-ho mob of survivors -- elicited the audience's sympathies. They possessed a degree of originality or even, in some cases, of personality, and seemed to have something to teach the alive. Moreover, the alive in Romero's Dead-series were always potentially more dangerous than the zombies. There is no such sense in this movie; here the undead are simply an undifferentiated mob. Romero's zombies shuffled ominously, as if inviting the audience to ponder their socio-political significance; Snyder prefers more threatening, fast-moving zombies, reminiscent of the afflicted human beings in Danny Boyle’s epic 28 Days Later. If we accept the notion of the inverse relationship between the otherness of monsters and the progressiveness of the movies in which they appear, then this movie is less radical than Romero's.

Nonetheless, while Snyder steers clear of the moralizing and satirical aspects of Romero's original, there is some overt social commentary in his movie to be found. The appearance of the American flag at the beginning and end of the movie somberly addresses the post-9/11 audience, in the same vein as the Stars and Stripes in the graveyard at the start of Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) suggested the deadliness of America’s foreign policy in Vietnam. Likewise, the early aerial shots of Ana's suburban neighborhood, mockingly scored to Stereophonics' “Have a Nice Day”, constitute a Romero-esque swipe at the sterility of western bourgeois culture. Here the cinematic style, as well as the narrative content, recall Romero's original, in which the aerial shots created the sense of distance required by satire. Fans of Romero's Dead-series will also enjoy the movie's visual jokes in Snyder’s rendition. There are several allusions to Romero's oeuvre, the most obvious of which is a clothing store named 'Gaylen Ross', the name of the actress who played Fran, the original film's heroine.

The gender politics of this film, on the other hand, give more cause for concern. In Romero's movie, the heroine Fran (Gaylen Ross) is pregnant and yet never reduced to a maternal body. She constantly struggles to be recognized as an autonomous agent, while the men discuss whether she should have an abortion in her absence. Fran becomes a multi-faceted heroine who is both an active agent and yet who is also able -– because of her position of inferiority in relation to the men in the film -- to identify with, and show sympathy for, the hapless zombies. In this movie, the pregnant Luda is reduced to her function as the carrier of a zombie baby, leaving the hard body action to Ana. This bifurcation of female roles in the remake dilutes the strong feminist import of the original film. It also reflects the remake's strong general tendency to present characters in relation to a relatively restricted narrative function rather than to symbolic or thematic significance. As a result, the characters are underdeveloped, leaving the viewer unable to care very deeply about any of them.

This remake amps up the adrenaline-charged action while skimping on the depth to deliver a gripping but relatively empty-headed thrill-ride. It’s enjoyable enough, but also less balanced, progressive and critical than its famous precursor.