Stop it!
You’re ignorant!
I’ve hear rumors about a fourth one (Afternoon of the Dead?) for decades. I’ll believe it when I see it playing in the theater down the street.
But I think you’re right that the success of the remake might be what finally kicks it off.
The Romero movies are like a slowly rising flood. You don’t really notice the rising water until all of a sudden it is at your doorstep and your car is floating down the street. By then there’s not much you can do to avoid it.
This new movie looks more like a tornado or tsunami. All of a sudden, without warning, a wave of zombie destruction is unleashed and smashes your neighborhood.
The most obvious diference will be the pacing of the movie. The Romero films are pretty slow but filled with tension because the characters have plenty of time to ponder their situation. I suspect that the characters in the remake will be spending most of their time runing and shooting.
Still, I enjoyed the 10 minute preview. The aerial shot of the nurses escape while cars careen and explode around her was nicely done.
I’m confused about one thing though - how did the daughter turn into a zombie?
That might be true of Night, but Dawn starts out in full confusion and at the television studio and then swings into gore at the SWAT team in the tenement scenes. Day also starts with a wonderfully horrifying scene of a street filled with zombies.
Well, you gotta get the audience involved and into the zombie action. I thought the opening ws brilliant, showing Sarah Polley’s character’s daily routine compressed into a short scene, and the hints of what’s coming (the patient with a bite in ICU, the news bulletin on the car radio she switches off).
Vivian isn’t their daughter, she’s a neighbor. Remember that Sarah Polley says “Say hi to your mother.”
For those who want to see more crunchy zombie goodness, Cinemovies, a French movie fan site, has 6 spoiler-filled clips up.
Be interesting to hear what the production history of this “remake” was- whether it had been in development for some time, or if it was (likely) a case of “Let’s get somethin out wit zombies” in the wake of 28 Days Later’s success.
As a buddy of mine pointed out, it’s kinda scummy of them to use the classic “Dawn of the Dead” identity, when this thing seems to owe much more to Danny Boyle’s film than any of George Romero’s.
But who am I kidding. I’ll see this the first week it’s in theaters. 
I ain’t that proud.
I’m confused about the bite victim at the hospital. Was he bitten by a zombie? If he was then wouldn’t he have been all zombiefied by the time the he got to the hospital? Or perhaps he was the first zombie and took longer to turn?
Or maybe it’s just extremely pointless to nitpick plot points in a zombie flick?
Right, but I didn’t get the impression that the Romero movies litterally took place over an actual Night/Dawn/Day cycle. That they were more figurative. By the time the original Dawn takes place, several Nights may have passed. By Day of the Dead, it seemed like many days (or weeks even) had passed. Especially since the zombies lurch around so slowly.
This new movies seems like zombies just explode everywhere at once.
Didn’t catch that. Thaks.
To my understanding, this is the same as in the previous films… just quicker.
When one died in the previous films, one had 8-15 minutes before reactivating as a zombie. In this film, that time seems compressed down to seconds.
When one is bitten in the previous films – regardless of how minor the bite – one has perhaps three or four days of wasting illness before death and reactivation. This would seem to be compressed down to hours, in the remake.
The original Night starts at the beginning of the outbreak, since nobody in the movie knows what’s happening at first. Dawn takes place well into the epidemic; there’s a line of dialogue in the TV studio when the talk show guest (“They get up and kill, the people they kill get up and KILL”-that guy) says something like, “We’ve been trying to to tell you for the last three weeks.” I have to doublecheck my Day DVD, but in the staff meeting scene, McDermott, the Irish drunk, says something like “I haven’t been able to raise anyone on the radio in the last 6 months,” leading me to think that Day takes place ~a year into the plague.
I think that it makes sense to have the new Dawn take place at the beginnign rather than start in the middle. It’s taking a whole new approach to the zombie genre, so it is fitting to start over from scratch.
Didn’t catch that. Thaks.
[/QUOTE]
I wonder why the new movie is set in Milwaukee? I was kind of hoping it’d be in Pennsylvania, but maybe they wanted to distance the production a bit from Romero’s milieu. At least they didn’t move it to LA! (Hollywood tends to forget there’s anything between Los Angeles and New York.)