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Land of the Dead
Eat the rich
2005
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Simon Baker, Dennis Hopper, John Leguizamo, Asia Argento
It’s never unwelcome.
THE SETUP:
As the living dead have taken over the land, those with enough money have sequestered themselves in a skyscraper where they live oblivious lives. A disgruntled employee plots to bring the building down, while the dead are getting smarter and planning to invade.
DISCUSSION:
It’s almost hard to sit down and really watch this movie without remaining removed by constantly checking it against one’s expectations. Two major things have happened since the masterpiece original Dawn of the Dead and its ambitious but less fully realized follow-up, Day of the Dead: for one, a number of zombie movies have been released in between that both carried the existing Romero tropes as far as they could go, and invented new and more titillating ways to get thrills from them, and that George Romero’s zombie movies have become most notable for their satirical subtext, instead of just being great horror movies. In one way this is good, because it encourages Romero to exercise his ambitions and focus on the satirical element; to take himself seriously with the expectation that audiences and critics will take him seriously as well. It’s a great position for a director to be in, and for the most part he balances the pull between fully-realized satire and exploding heads fairly well. So why do I feel like I have to convince myself that this movie is really good?
It may be the aspect of bringing the satire into the foreground—and how familiar that satire feels from other movies, some of them Romero’s. In this film, those with money live an oblivious life of shopping and dining in a mall-like skyscraper environment. Those just outside live hardscrabble lives in the virtually destroyed walled city. Outside the city the zombies roam. The ruler of the skyscraper, Kaufman [Dennis Hopper] sends teams out to surrounding cities to scavenge for food and medical supplies. When he refuses to let one of these employees, Cholo [John Leguizamo], become a resident of the skyscraper, presumably because he doesn’t fit the social and ethnic qualifications, Cholo steals his armored vehicle and threatens to bomb the skyscraper. Meanwhile, the dead are getting smarter [rapidly], and are invading the city on their own.
The satire is brought to the foreground, but not enough for my taste. The perceived need to deliver gory zombie action as well seems to pull the movie in two directions. I would have liked to have spent most or all of my time in the skyscraper, getting involved in character’s personal lives as played out against their willful ignorance of the dangers around them. This amounted for a great deal of the power of Day of the Dead, in which the characters’ petty conflicts took place in an environment literally surrounded by hordes of zombies. In Land, we see a few shots of the interior of the skyscraper at the beginning, but not enough to really get the message across, or to deliver all the resonance the later scenes of the zombies penetrating the literal fantasy world could have packed. The other problem is that we’ve seen this satire before, and its lack of focused attention only makes it feel more second-hand. The idea of the wealthy living sheltered lives high above the rabble is familiar from Blade Runner and, oddly enough, Judge Dredd. The rest of the themes come from splicing both Dawn and Day; the idea of living obliviously in a self-contained fortress comes straight from Dawn, the zombies lurking just beyond the perimeter from Day, the idea of zombie intelligence is developed from Day. To me, the entirety of the action with the main characters [Legiuzamo, etc.] could have been dropped from the film, and I think that would have made the film stronger. But then you would have very few zombie munching scenes, and that is what the audience paid for.
The problem with the characters we do focus on, led by Cholo and Riley [Simon Baker], the man sent out to contain him, is that their conflict isn’t that interesting in itself, and bears only a tangential relationship to the real content of the movie. This is a departure from both Dawn and Day, where the interpersonal relationships were fascinating and involving in themselves, and strengthened the potency of the satirical content, which stayed primarily in the background—and was stronger for it. Here the lack of compelling characters in the foreground forces a focus on the satirical elements, which haven’t been given enough meat to make up for it.
I know I sound like I didn’t like it, but that isn’t the case. I think it’ll be a few years before we can really judge how it holds up as a further installment of the series and see it without the weight of such expectations. The fact that it’s a 7.5 instead of a 9 allows a lot of focus on why it didn’t make up the difference, but the fact is that a Romero zombie movie is superior to the competition because it is about something other than just exploding heads. I would rather this one be a little different, but I really am glad just to have it at all.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Yes. Regardless of how we eventually come to regard this as part of Romero's oeuvre, it is definitely worth seeing.
RELATED MOVIES:
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is the first of Romero's zombie movies, and is a genuine classic horror legend.
DAWN OF THE DEAD is his second zombie film and is probably the best horror movie ever made. You MUST see this film.
DAY OF THE DEAD is the third, and is quite ambitious and good, but it can seem quite cheesy.
