Land of the Dead
I was very surprised at the amount of effort I had to go to in order to see Land of the Dead today. It wasn’t showing anywhere in our immediate area. Not at our local theater, not at any theater in the area, not even in any theaters within about an hour’s drive. I did eventually find one theater showing it, in Burlington, which meant a ferry trip and a decent-length drive…but we really wanted to see this movie, and that was our only option.
I’m glad we went to the effort to go see this movie - it was well worth it. The theater itself was far superior to what we’ve got back at home. The tickets were cheaper, for one thing - we paid about $12 over in Burlington, and it is normally about $16 here at home. The theater itself was very different, more like the pseudo-Imax thing we went to up in Montreal. The seats were stacked up in such a way that you were much closer to the screen, and nobody’s head was in your way. The seats also reclined quite a bit and were very comfortable. The screen seemed bigger…but that could have just been our proximity to it…
The movie itself was good… Different, but good. It really isn’t what I’d call a traditional George Romero zombie movie. I guess I’m a bit of a picky bastard when it comes to my zombie movies…but I’ve come to expect a certain style and tone from Romero’s zombies - a tone that was definitely there in the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead, but which was absent in Land of the Dead. It’s understandable though, to have an entirely different feel to the movie, since the plot has evolved quite a bit at this point in the series.
In the other three movies, the natural order of things has been upset. We see plenty of people trying to cope with their new reality and simply stay alive. There’s a terrific sense of wrongness - the dead should not be walking! In Land of the Dead, however, it isn’t so wrong anymore. The dead basically rule the Earth now, and we are the minority. Worse, the dead are actually starting to evolve, to gain intelligence of a sort, to genuinely replace us.
Land of the Dead felt more like an action movie to me, than horror. Kind of like the difference between Alien and Aliens. There wasn’t so much creeping around and getting scared as there was raw mayhem and carnage - which is fine, but different.
This time around we also have a zombie protagonist…or at least something very similar. One of the zombies is introduced very early on in the movie and becomes a recurring character, if you can actually call shuffling around and grunting having character. Actually, through the course of the movie, you do see the zombies develop some personality. They aren’t just mindless killing machines like they’ve been in the past, you actually get an inkling of who they might have been before they died, and what they might become now. It’s a limited kind of personality, because they are dead…but it’s a hell of a lot more personality than you’ve gotten before.
Ultimately, it was a very entertaining movie. Not entirely what I expected, but satisfying nonetheless. I’m still hoping they’ll remake more of the Dead movies though… I’d love to see a remake of Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead in the same style as the recent Dawn of the Dead remake.
