"Day of the Dead" x2

"Day of the Dead" is one of the great missed opportunities of zombie art. "Night of the Living Dead" is great, "Dawn of the Dead" takes the aesthetic a step further, and "Day" would have gone all the way in expanding the critique of American culture. For those who haven't seen it--and there are plenty, as "Day" is rightly ignored by those not immersed in zombie stuff--"Day" takes place well after zombies have kicked the shit out of humanity. The film's protagonists are a small group of soldiers and scientists locked in an underground bunker/laboratory where they selectively capture zombies for experimentation. The soldiers are guided by the worst chauvinist impulses, threatening the female scientist and the very project of science throughout. If "Dawn" issued a sneering image of consumerism, "Day" assaulted the union of dromocracy and science as the progenitors of knowledge-power in its simplest, cruelest, and most inhuman form. What's worse, and more brilliant, is that the procedures of capture and scientific torture makes the viewer sympathetic to the zombies. In idea if not in execution, Romero's "Day of the Dead" is in the best critical zombie tradition.

So it was with mixed emotion that I spotted a remake of "Day" while perusing the Red Box by our house for "Coraline." One of the things that stands out is that the "Day" remake stars Ving Rames, one of the principals in the horrible remake of "Dawn" a few years ago. "Dawn" did not need remaking, but I can see room for improvement in "Day." The remake also has a couple semi-recognizable actors: Nick Cannon (Wild n Out, Drumline), Mena Suvari (American Beauty!) and AnnaLynne McCord (Nip/Tuck and the remake of 90210). If someone wanted to do penance for the remake of "Dawn," this would be the way.

Obviously they chose instead to make a total piece of shit. But let's be objective about it.

The first two thirds of the remake is the initial zombie outbreak. The version of zombie powers used here (as well cinematography, lighting, etc) line up with the remake of "Dawn" so it's pretty boring. In fact, it is the same basic "whoah, something bad is happening and we don't know why" story that goes unspoken in the genre. What Romero had accomplished in his zombie trilogy going into "Day" was the ability to make a sci-fi movie while avoiding exposition of what cannot be explained--that is, to tell a story dependent on counterfactuals without being drawn into the cycle of explaining the unexplainable. (Even in "Dawn" he is able to give an expository montage in the first five minutes). The remake, however, spends most of its screen time on what was one of the crucial, subtle accomplishments of Romero's third zombie movie.

This is even more outrageous when we consider that the zombie movie is today well recognized--so well recognized that new incarnations have to be tweaked in some way to be viable--and that this clearly follows on the remake of "Dawn," which would at the very, very minimum provide a starting point for a follow up. Alas, the will to repeat that creates the remake is also an atavistic will to unnecessary expository parataxis. If the characters and their lives were interesting, that would be one thing--in fact, that would be Romero's recent "Diary of the Dead"--but this movie is shit so we have two dimensional horror cut outs. Which is acceptable in the genre, but not when the external circumstances do not offer a substitution for the subjectivity of the characters.

At last our band of survivors finds themselves in an underground military bunker/laboratory (!) where some govt conglomerate had been developing bioweapons. I missed some of the detail at this point because I realized doing the dishes was a better use of my time. In short, a couple people die, including Nick Cannon who was the only one holding this thing together, a couple people live, and they blow the hell out of the zombies and drive away. A radio reports that order has been restored but then a zombie jumps up in front of the camera so we know that more is to come. Where the remake of "Dawn" ended nihilistically with the slaughter of all principals during the credits, contrasting with the parenthetical promise of Romero's final cut (an earlier version had all characters dying), this remake is relatively hopeful. The zombie plague is an airborne virus, but some people are immune and it seems localized. That movie about Ebola with the monkeys had a worse scenario, and that didn't kill us all. Romero's "Day" was awesomely nihilistic. So, on both occasions the remakes of Romero's films have reversed the tonality of the endings so as to display a total ignorance of the thematic context of the film. Escape is thematically possible in Romero's "Dawn" because it is in the nature of the mall to be reiterated, traveled between, variant but within the great circulation of capital--one must leave the mall, but with the grim awareness that all one can hope for is to find another mall. In contrast, the laboratory and military science repeats but it repeats exactly. Like empire, the laboratory is endless and undifferentiated. Romero was right to have "Day" be a basically depressing movie where revenge is the only pleasure, and the ending is not so much evidence of pessimism as dictated by the material.

What do we make of this final image: the survivors pull out of sight, into the Colorado mountain backdrop, and a zombie leaps up directly in front of the camera to shake its head (menacingly?). Obviously, it contravenes the radio voice over: the event is not fully contained. But to where will it spread? Some other passably vaguely-named small town in Colorado, from which its inhabitants dream of escaping to an "anywhere" of the mountain sunset or, in the case of Suvari's character, the US military? The marker of spatial specificity here is the zombie itself: it stands in direct relation to the camera. But it too is reduced (or elevated) to an "anywhereness" as a film effect directed to the viewer. Wherever you are, the zombie is addressing you. The zombie in this scene, then, is pulled in two directions: out of the screen, into a somewhat abashed address to a viewer it cannot read but who can examine it (like Romero's scientists), and back into the film, back to the woodsy periphery of the town, back to an origin point that might be Anywhere USA but is the belated anchor for the zombie mythos. The zombie might be transported to any screen or imagined in any shadowy field, hospital, or friendly face, but at this moment it stands in a determinate distance to the camera that fixes it for examination. Even the zombie has become a "character" in the sad sense this holds for unimaginative horror movies.