This movie is real dumb. I know that zombie movie fans love their gore. While this film does have some quality gore, you have to get through terrible metaphor, poor storytelling, and atrocious dialogue for over an hour to get there. This honestly doesn't feel like it's the work of Romero. The minimalist filmmaker who made Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead with tight focus and an eye for subtle characterization has been replaced by the overbearingly obvious and angry old man who made Day of the Dead. Throw in the fact that this world makes literally no sense, and you've got yourself a bad time, a long stretch of drudgery until zombies start eating people inventively.
Years after the zombie apocalypse has torn apart society, Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) rules Pittsburgh with an iron fist by...never leaving the highest levels of Fiddler's Green, a massive skyscraper. Doing his bidding is Riley (Simon Baker) who's going out into the smaller towns around Pittsburgh for one last supply run before he retires (ugh). His lieutenant, Cholo (John Leguizamo), is a hothead who has been selling liquor at inflated prices to secure enough money to join Kaufman in Fiddler's Green.
And right off the bat, we see the problem with zombie movies: zombies are terrible monsters. They're slow, dumb, and easily killed. There is no reason why a zombie apocalypse should be allowed to spread at all, much less to consume the world. However, giving the film the idea that the apocalypse spread too fast to stop until they reached this stalemate where the last of humanity is secure behind walls and rivers while the zombies fester about outside without any need to eat and just keep going forever (violating the laws of thermodynamics, but whatever), the zombie numbers can only go up with every human who newly dies. Their numbers can't grow geometrically anymore. They wander around mindlessly, easy targets to a militarized force. So, why isn't there an effort to wipe out as many as possible, clear out sectors, and retake the world? It doesn't have to be top down, it can be bottom up. The good ole boys who had no trouble in Night could clear out small towns and live.
And then you get to the vision of Pittsburgh. There is absolutely no industry in the city. All the people do is either wander the streets as poor people who wander the shops in Fiddler's Green. There's no production. There is only the reclaiming of canned goods from outlying towns and a healthy selection of vice to keep the people down. It makes just this side of absolutely no sense unless it's about the metaphor of America under a regime that uses fighting a force as an excuse to suppress the freedoms of its people. So, the world makes no sense, but it's a metaphor. Ugh. I hate symbolism. You can't critique it because it's a metaphor. Whatever.
Anyway, the actual story is about an armored truck. Cholo is mad because Kaufman won't let him into the club, so he steals the truck, including missile launchers, to destroy Fiddler's Green. Kaufman sends Riley to take back the truck (he designed it, in a meaningless detail), and Riley brings his best friend Charlie (Robert Joy) and a prostitute who was sent to die in a zombie pit for...reasons, Slack (Asia Argento) on the mission. If the film were just the mission, it might have been okay. It's not Romero at his greatest, but it's decently built enough with clear goals and clear action. However it, like pretty much the whole film, is beset by awful dialogue that spells out the most basic of things for the dumbest of audience members. Were you unable to figure out that zombies are transfixed by fireworks? Well, good luck for you, it's explained, explicitly, even though it's painfully easy to figure out. All of these stupid little bits of dialogue explaining easy to understand things, from beginning to end.
At the same time, Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) is a zombie who has evolved to some sort of level of problem-solving and leadership, leading an increasingly large horde of zombies towards Pittsburgh with Fiddler's Green functioning as a beacon in the night to attract them. Another hit against the film regarding its world-building is the lack of security around the city. Let's just say it's inconsistent. There's an early scene where we see the electric fences designed to stop them, but the river itself is barely guarded. Has humanity really gotten to this point and not realized that zombies can just walk through the water without dying? That seems like a major question that would have been answered very early and prepared for.
So, it's not guarded because if it was guarded then the ending wouldn't happen. It's stupid people being stupid because plot, except it's at the core of the film's worldbuilding. It's hard to engage with the simplistic story when everything around it is dumb. Real dumb.
At least the extended bits of action and gore are quality. That's the thin entertainment of the film's final act, even if nothing leading up to it made any sense or was at all compelling in any way. Also, Romero has a good eye, especially around the approaching zombie horde. It looks pretty good from time to time, is what I'm saying.
This movie is stupid to its core. It doesn't work as a story. Its characters are uniformly dumb. The situation makes no sense. It all falls apart the second you think about it at all. Hiding behind metaphor is a terrible defense since the text still needs to work even when there's intended subtext. Again, the gore is decent, though.
Romero should have chosen to try and keep funding something else rather than just giving into making another zombie movie after the success of Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead.
Years after the zombie apocalypse has torn apart society, Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) rules Pittsburgh with an iron fist by...never leaving the highest levels of Fiddler's Green, a massive skyscraper. Doing his bidding is Riley (Simon Baker) who's going out into the smaller towns around Pittsburgh for one last supply run before he retires (ugh). His lieutenant, Cholo (John Leguizamo), is a hothead who has been selling liquor at inflated prices to secure enough money to join Kaufman in Fiddler's Green.
And right off the bat, we see the problem with zombie movies: zombies are terrible monsters. They're slow, dumb, and easily killed. There is no reason why a zombie apocalypse should be allowed to spread at all, much less to consume the world. However, giving the film the idea that the apocalypse spread too fast to stop until they reached this stalemate where the last of humanity is secure behind walls and rivers while the zombies fester about outside without any need to eat and just keep going forever (violating the laws of thermodynamics, but whatever), the zombie numbers can only go up with every human who newly dies. Their numbers can't grow geometrically anymore. They wander around mindlessly, easy targets to a militarized force. So, why isn't there an effort to wipe out as many as possible, clear out sectors, and retake the world? It doesn't have to be top down, it can be bottom up. The good ole boys who had no trouble in Night could clear out small towns and live.
And then you get to the vision of Pittsburgh. There is absolutely no industry in the city. All the people do is either wander the streets as poor people who wander the shops in Fiddler's Green. There's no production. There is only the reclaiming of canned goods from outlying towns and a healthy selection of vice to keep the people down. It makes just this side of absolutely no sense unless it's about the metaphor of America under a regime that uses fighting a force as an excuse to suppress the freedoms of its people. So, the world makes no sense, but it's a metaphor. Ugh. I hate symbolism. You can't critique it because it's a metaphor. Whatever.
Anyway, the actual story is about an armored truck. Cholo is mad because Kaufman won't let him into the club, so he steals the truck, including missile launchers, to destroy Fiddler's Green. Kaufman sends Riley to take back the truck (he designed it, in a meaningless detail), and Riley brings his best friend Charlie (Robert Joy) and a prostitute who was sent to die in a zombie pit for...reasons, Slack (Asia Argento) on the mission. If the film were just the mission, it might have been okay. It's not Romero at his greatest, but it's decently built enough with clear goals and clear action. However it, like pretty much the whole film, is beset by awful dialogue that spells out the most basic of things for the dumbest of audience members. Were you unable to figure out that zombies are transfixed by fireworks? Well, good luck for you, it's explained, explicitly, even though it's painfully easy to figure out. All of these stupid little bits of dialogue explaining easy to understand things, from beginning to end.
At the same time, Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) is a zombie who has evolved to some sort of level of problem-solving and leadership, leading an increasingly large horde of zombies towards Pittsburgh with Fiddler's Green functioning as a beacon in the night to attract them. Another hit against the film regarding its world-building is the lack of security around the city. Let's just say it's inconsistent. There's an early scene where we see the electric fences designed to stop them, but the river itself is barely guarded. Has humanity really gotten to this point and not realized that zombies can just walk through the water without dying? That seems like a major question that would have been answered very early and prepared for.
So, it's not guarded because if it was guarded then the ending wouldn't happen. It's stupid people being stupid because plot, except it's at the core of the film's worldbuilding. It's hard to engage with the simplistic story when everything around it is dumb. Real dumb.
At least the extended bits of action and gore are quality. That's the thin entertainment of the film's final act, even if nothing leading up to it made any sense or was at all compelling in any way. Also, Romero has a good eye, especially around the approaching zombie horde. It looks pretty good from time to time, is what I'm saying.
This movie is stupid to its core. It doesn't work as a story. Its characters are uniformly dumb. The situation makes no sense. It all falls apart the second you think about it at all. Hiding behind metaphor is a terrible defense since the text still needs to work even when there's intended subtext. Again, the gore is decent, though.
Romero should have chosen to try and keep funding something else rather than just giving into making another zombie movie after the success of Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead.