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The Story: A mysterious plague turns the world's population into flesh-hungry, undead ghouls, forcing a group of survivors to seek refuge inside an abandoned shopping mall in this re-imagining of George A. Romero's classic film.

As the tiresome "remake debate" continues, Hollywood unflinchingly continues its current trend of reviving and repackaging popular classic and foreign horror films for modern Western audiences with increasingly positive returns. Regardless of who's doing what to such venerable fan favorites as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Ringu, and now Dawn of the Dead, at the end of the day, all an average horror fan like myself really wants to know is 1) does the movie remain true to the spirit of the original and 2) is it any good? Though every purist's fears are confirmed in the extensive liberties taken with George Romero's narrative structure and established mythology, the new Dawn of the Dead should provide a welcome change of pace for zombie fans looking for fresh blood in an old corpse.

One morning in suburban Wisconsin, nurse Ana (Polley) and her husband awaken to find a young neighborhood girl, seemingly injured, standing in their bedroom doorway. To Ana's horror, the lipless little girl lunges and bites a hunk out of her husband's neck. Just seconds after his death, Ana's husband rises and chases her into the bathroom, where she barely makes it out the window. Escaping in her car, Ana is shocked to discover that the world has literally gone to hell overnight as sirens wail, helicopters hover overhead, and fires blaze out of control while her bloody husband hauls ass after her in a murderous rage. After the surrounding chaos sends her hurtling off the road and into a tree, Ana wakes from unconsciousness to find herself in an apocalyptic world beyond her wildest nightmares. In the company of a hardened police officer (Ving Rhames), a level-headed nice guy (Jake Weber), and a troubled young man (Mekhi Phifer) and his very pregnant, Russian wife (Inna Korobkina), Ana takes up residence in a presumably empty shopping mall to devise a plan while an army of ravenous zombies gather outside.

Not content with taking the safe road, Troma alumni and Scooby Doo scribe James Gunn proves with the intriguing pre-credit sequence that he's capable of successfully building new and interesting situations on the foundation of Romero's basic premise. Though the first hour is highlighted by a few intensely well-staged attacks, the midsection suffers from introducing a bland band of zombie fodder when the time would have been better spent fleshing out the main characters until the exciting, zombie-filled final third.

Where much of the original's success is attributed to the chemistry of its four, well-drawn protagonists, Gunn's script is so cluttered with secondary characters there's little room left for the leads, all of whom are capable actors, to grow. Just as I was getting a handle on the initial group's personalities, Gunn introduces C.J. (Micheal Kelly), a gun-waving security guard and his cronies, followed by a truckload of largely uninteresting survivors including Steve (Ty Burrell), the token cynical, wisecracking asshole. Characters even play against type in several instances: the usually sensitive Michael is the first to suggest that they shoot an infected survivor while hot-headed C.J. takes a sudden heroic turn near the end. Surprisingly, the best human moments in the movie come when stone-faced Kenneth begins an amusing long distance friendship with a gun store owner stranded on the roof of his shop, right after turning his back on the group. Using dry-erase boards and binoculars to communicate, the two exchange information, play chess, and indulge in a game of "shoot-the-celebrity-zombie" to crowd pleasing effect. And as expected, blatant stupidity is no exception here as one female character one-ups Alien's Lieutenant Ellen Ripley by putting everyone's life in immediate danger, driving across a zombie-packed street to retrieve a dog that had seemingly only been with the group for a couple of days.

What Snyderss movie lacks in characterization, it makes up for in frantic zombie-action. A far cry from Romero's eerily shambling, blue-faced automatons, these things owe more to 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle's "infected" as they come running at you full-speed ahead, wild-eyed and shrieking for human flesh before tearing you to shreds in an undead dog-pile. Though many have expressed concern over this aspect, Snyder pulls it off without a hitch as every zombie scene is executed to terrifying effect. Try throwing a pie in the face of one of these things; you're likely to pull back a stump. In other words, Roger wouldn't want to play around with these guys. Not only are they the most intensely frightening zombies since Day of the Dead, they're ironically the best looking cinematic undead since John Vulich and Everett Burell's work in the Tom Savini's 1990 Night of the Living Dead remake. Though the quick editing during the finale didn’t allow me to get a good look at much of the impressive make-up work, many zombies featured early on in the movie such as the "the one-armed jogger", "the janitor" and of course that disgusting "fat lady" are sure to become zombie fan favorites.

Though far from the graphic excesses of Romero's seminal masterpiece, I was nevertheless surprised by some of what I saw. While you won't see any gratuitous intestine-pulling, you will catch a quick glimpse of "the janitor" munching on exposed guts. When compared to the original, the head-shots aren't excessive, but they are probably the most realistic ever filmed as scalps detach, blood splatters, and chunks fly. In addition to a nice Savini-style head explosion and a couple of head-impalings, I was caught off guard by some incredibly graphic chainsaw action that had the audience in an uproar. And while a few overhead shots were achieved via CGI, the majority of effects are practical and un-intrusive, save for one silly bit involving a baby zombie (that's right).

Snyder's Dawn looks great with a washed-out look that gives its suburban wasteland settings a gritty, realistic feel. However, where the mall in Romero's version was an important component of the film's underlying themes, here it is merely used as a convenient setting for the survivors to hole-up while the situation outside becomes progressively more hopeless. Though Snyder shows a quick montage of the group playing around the mall, the sense of fun and false freedom inherent in Romero's situations are lost. Although a few of the popular rock cues drag the movie into the mainstream gutter, they counterbalance Tyler Bate's eerie, doom-laden score well enough to work.

Despite an unnecessarily large cast, weak characterization, and a sluggish middle, Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead is an undemanding, often exciting zombie movie with style to spare. Before dismissing it as just another slick exercise in "MTV" filmmaking with nothing to say, Snyder's simple depiction of vastly different people working together to survive a crisis is effective considering the country's post-9/11 environment. Though it probably won't convert many of its detractors and wasn't quite as terrifying as I anticipated, the new Dawn of the Dead should provide fans with something to chew on until the lameness of Land of the Dead is forgotten.