By Chris Summerfield
“When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth”
The movie starts as just another regular day for Ana (Sarah Polley) who works as a nurse and returns home after a very long shift, living in Milwaukee Wisconsin, with her husband Luis (Louis Ferreira) though after a night of passion they are woken by their neighbour’s daughter Vivian (Hannah Lochner). She attacks Luis, who quickly succumbs to the infection. Ana flees the house to see her neighbourhood in total disaster, as panic and murder kicks in.
This movie reflects how quickly society could meltdown under such circumstances and how important working together is, as Ana and other survivors make their way to a shopping mall and eventually team up with other survivors, though tensions are often high, they still have to find away to survive and escape the Mall that had imprisoned them.
In this movie the zombies are fast paced, in which I was no fan of, as I do like the traditional shuffling feet ones, though saying that the fast paced zombies within this movie do add an element of fear to this movie because how to you flee the Mall when there are thousands of zombies able to run and keep up with you? And you can understand how fast a disease spreads if those contaminated would travel at such speed.
There are some great characters within the movie such as: the policeman Kenneth Hall (Ving Rhames) the diplomatic Michael (Jake Weber) CJ (Michael Kelly) and of course the lone gunman Andy (Bruce Borne) and there is plenty of gore and zombie fun, a zombie baby and you cannot help but feel the anguish for the characters.
As regards the movie, it was the directorial debut for Zack Synder, and was always going to be difficult to live up to the original, 1978 “Dawn of the dead” perhaps that was the reason for changes he made within this movie to the original?
This is an action packed edge of your seat zombie flick, with at times emotional moments and like most zombie movies there are tragedies and hard decisions that have to be made, such as: Would you shoot the zombie newborn baby?
This movie is a cool movie, though was never going to live up to the original, therefore on its own merit
Rating: 7/10