Film Review: George Romero's Land of the Dead.

The problem with George A. Romero's Land of the Dead isn't that it's a bad, film, really. If it were his first zombie film, it would probably have garnered more critical sympathy. But it isn't, of course; it's his fourth. That's also where it ranks in quality and importance among them. But what makes the film seem even more lightweight is the fact that a generation of filmmakers who grew up watching Romero's original trilogy now execute the genre with more skill and aptitude than he has. Danny Boyle's creepy 2002 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder's wickedly sly and funny 2004 remake of Romero's 1976 originalDawn of the Dead both blow the doors off of their mentor's current effort. It's as if the old teacher showed up to give the younguns a final comeuppance, only to discover that they've far surpassed him in ability.

I'll admit a touch of bias: I love zombie movies. They have a unique horror potential that, say, slasher films do not in that they are not about middling, small-scale stuff like campground killers in hockey masks and disfigured pedophiles invading dreams: they are about hell backing up like sewage and spitting forth the apocalypse onto the world. You know who's going to win in a zombie move--it's as inevitable as the end of the world, and the sheer force of attrition--you just don't know how they're going to win. This ever-darker, running out of places to hide stuff, done well, can be pretty unnerving.

But it's anything but terrifying in LOTD. The plot is serviceable enough: the evil Kauffman (an either utterly dispirited or washed-up Dennis Hopper) owns and manages a lily-white skyscraper community known as the Green in a fortified segment of (perhaps) the last human city. He employs a salvage operation led by Riley and Cholo (Simon Baker and John Leguizamo), who both collect trash from the Green and moonlight making supply runs with Dead Reckoning, their armed-to-the-teeth garbage hauler, into the zombie-infested outlying areas. Our new twist is that the zombies are learning to work cooperatively, making life increasingly dangerous for the salvage team and the enclosed city itself.

But this isn't a new twist at all. Romero had already shown that zombies were teachable in 1985's Day of the Dead, where a former soldier zombie remembers how to salute and fire a gun. This idea, like the rest of the zombie depictions, is merely a pastiche of all of his earlier work. LOTD isn’t a bad pastiche, necessarily, just as 1993'sVoodoo Lounge wasn't a bad Rolling Stones album. They're both just twenty years out of date, performing work done better and with more enthusiasm by younger artists. The zombies still look good, and the flesh-eating scenes are as creepy as ever, but they were that creepy in 1976. A genre has to evolve to be worth its salt, and Romero's genre, while it has, seems to have done so in his absence.

So with the zombies giving us nothing new or particularly scary, we're left with a passable melodrama and Romero's ubiquitous, heavy-handed social commentary, such as Kauffman's oh-so-subtle, "I do not negotiate with terrorists!" Much of the dialogue explores themes of social stratification, personal loyalty, and group ethics in a world in which everyone’s concern is immediate survival—and these aren’t bad concerns to explore. But the scenes themselves aren’t really written well enough to handle the points they’re engaging. Romero seems to be in a place that he has never seemed in his previous Dead films: in over his head. Sure, it's watchable, and even campily likeable in a few places, but it isn't really what we came for.

Grade: C.