The Crazies (2010)

There are a lot of reasons to remake a movie, none of them very good. Sometimes there have been so many sequels already that the only way to continue the franchise is to restart it. We have seen a rash of these in recent years, Nightmare on Elm Street being the newest (note: I don't approve of rebooting the franchise, but I sure do like the idea of Jackie Earle Haley as the new face of Freddy). Sometimes a movie has a small but loyal following and the filmmakers hope to gain a wider audience for something they consider great by releasing a new version of it. Or technology has changed since the time of the original, and the filmmaker feels he can make a better-looking version of the same story. I suppose this is what justified remaking King Kong. Perhaps the hardest remake rational to argue with is when the original director himself remakes his own film, as Michael Haneke did with Funny Games last year. If anyone has the right to tamper with the legacy of a film, surely the director does. But if you go down the road of creator ownership, eventually you will run into George Lukas, and you will have to admit that just because a person created something, that does not mean he understands it. 

The Crazies was not remade for any of these reasons. Director Breck Eisner approached the project with the question, "What would George Romero have done with this if he had had more money?" So far so good. First, he hired real actors. Fine. He added big explosions. Fine again. Then he edited out all the really terrifying parts. You know, the horror. 

It's been a long time since I saw The Crazies. I saw it only once, and I remember it for one reason: because it was horrifying. 

The Crazies was very much in the Romero mold: mysterious illness infects a population, no one knows who to trust, a small group of unconnected people are thrown together in rural Pennsylvania, where they all turn on each other. Ugly things happen. Some not-very-subtle points are made about human nature and/or politics and/or society. Very ugly things happen. Roll credits. 

The remake of The Crazies is a perfectly adequate epidemic movie. Timothy Olyphant is a likable small-town sheriff, Radha Mitchell is a likable extremely hot small-town doctor. Joe Anderson (who I did not remember from the three movies imdb tells me I've seen him in) was very convincingly not British. There are jumpy moments, and big fires, and one pretty cool scene in a carwash. But I will forget all those things pretty quickly. I will never forget a certain scene from the 1973 movie. If you've seen the old one, I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about. 

p.s. Was it the music or the hand-held camera or the hot teenagers that made me think more than once that I was watching an episode of Friday Night Lights? Am I the only person who had this experience? The Internet says I am. 

Zombieland

The walking dead should walk slowly. They should not run. Think of these corpses, raised from slumber by some unknown and incomprehensible force. They are new to this form of locomotion, and their muscles do not respond as expected. Wanton disregard for their own well-being has, in many if not most cases, caused them to sustain multiple injuries. Even if they feel no pain (and “zombies” do not feel pain in the way we do, although they may feel something), they cannot run on a broken ankle, or a torn achilles. Poor zombies.

But it seems zombies have been working out. More and more, the undead are portrayed as faster and stronger than the living humans they subsist on. These fast-moving flesh eaters can be scary in their own way, but they are more like the old monsters: werewolves, or yetis, or lions and tigers and bears. They are predators, and we can escape them through our superior wits and technology, but we cannot outrun them, because they are essentially the same beasts we have feared since we first stood up on two legs. Zombieland’s undead are decidedly in this latter category, the athletic undead.

What makes the living dead of the classic Night of the Living Dead scary is not simply the fact that have been reanimated. Nor is it their modified cannibalism (Question: is it technically cannibalism when they eat only the flesh of living humans and never each other?), although the images of vacant-eyed undead masticating arm muscle certainly produce some visceral reaction. The truly frightening—and new—thing about Romero’s undead comes from their weakness, the fact that individual zombies are so easily eluded or defeated. It does not matter that you can outrun the shambling corpse in the graveyard—and you certainly can—because there will be another near the car, or behind a tree, or looming up out of the darkness in your front yard. There will always be another.

That Zombieland features zombies who run is a failure not of Zombieland itself, but of the entire zombie genre to which it is a response. Zombieland is a movie about zombie movies, and in the cultural contest between high-speed, Danny-Boyle—style undead flesh-eaters and the lumbering living dead of Night etc, it is pretty clear that the scarier and more interesting slow zombies have already lost. Zombieland is the proof, because Zombieland exists in a cultural setting where an explanation of the plague—what caused it, how it spread, where it started—is almost irrelevant, and certainly unnecessary. Everyone knows what a zombie is.

Zombieland is not a bad movie. Every aspect of the film does what it means to do; it is funny, romantic, gory, smart. The performances are strong, especially one awesome (and often spoiled, but far be it from me…) cameo. Here is Jesse Eisenberg, still playing the same thoughtful, neurotic descendant of some hybrid of Woody Allen and Holden Caulfield that he has been playing since he was tiny (and here I am again, sort of liking him in spite of the fact that I was sure I had heard enough stories about how hard it is to be a smart, introspective, adolescent white boy growing up in middle America). And here is Abigail Breslin, who no longer looks like a little girl, trading one-liners with Woody Harrelson.

Like in the superior Shaun of the Dead, the zombies in Zombieland are mere background, in this case for a family road-trip action comedy (sort of like a National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation, with automatic weapons). Unlike Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland has no rough edges. It is slick and fast and full of self-confidence. Maybe that is the difference between the zombie movies Zombieland is responding to and the Romero family of zombie movies (which SotD is about); Romero gleefully explores a crazy idea, while the fast-zombie movies are sardonic and a little smug, and their underlying idea is ultimately safe.

For lovers of Night of the Living Dead, there is something sad about Zombieland. It feels like a nail in the coffin of the thing Romero invented, which was maybe the first new thing in horror in a century. The shambling, slack-jawed, vacant-eyed animated corpse that feeds on the flesh of the living, that can be killed with a shotgun blast or a good solid blow to the head, that can be outrun by any child, but can never be defeated because the one thing this threat requires to keep coming is the one thing we will never stop providing: more corpses.