![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Land of The Dead
May. 31st, 2006 02:04 pmFinally saw George Romero's Land Of The Dead, and I know exactly why it wasn't well received.
It's not that the special effects weren't gorey enough or too CGI. As far as gore special effects are concerned, there's really no place the industry can go from here other than start using actual bodies and actual weapons and actual blood and actual guts.
It's not that it was too polished or stylized of a movie. They did an adequate job of showing that the "Bad Guy" who ran the whole city had specifically made the city like it was (shopping malls and condos for the rich, prostitution and other vices for the poor) in order to make money.
It's not a lack of respect for what had come before. Plenty of cameos and nods to the films that had come before (including the return of Tom Savini as the zombie biker "Machette"), this movie was a natural progresion from the previous George Romero zombie films.
It's not a lack of subversive sub-text. Rich people don't care about the poor, poor people wish they could be rich so they wouldn't have to care, and the TRULY poor (the homeless/the zombies) just want a return to normalcy.
No, you wanna know what it was?
None of the "Heroes" died.
A *GOOD* zombie film always has one or more (if not all) of the "Good Guys" die throughout the movie. You need to be shocked. You need to feel threatened. You need to think AT LEAST ONCE during the film "Oh crap! That dude just got bit! ANYBODY COULD DIE AT ANY MOMENT!"
In this film, you knew if the character was gonna live or die just from their introduction. And there were NO SUPRISES. The ad guys all died, the good guys all lived, and I was left with an unsatisfying "And they all lived happily ever after". George Romero films should not leave you like that! They should leave you shaken to your core! You should stumle out of the theater going "Well THAT certainly sucks"!
It's not that the special effects weren't gorey enough or too CGI. As far as gore special effects are concerned, there's really no place the industry can go from here other than start using actual bodies and actual weapons and actual blood and actual guts.
It's not that it was too polished or stylized of a movie. They did an adequate job of showing that the "Bad Guy" who ran the whole city had specifically made the city like it was (shopping malls and condos for the rich, prostitution and other vices for the poor) in order to make money.
It's not a lack of respect for what had come before. Plenty of cameos and nods to the films that had come before (including the return of Tom Savini as the zombie biker "Machette"), this movie was a natural progresion from the previous George Romero zombie films.
It's not a lack of subversive sub-text. Rich people don't care about the poor, poor people wish they could be rich so they wouldn't have to care, and the TRULY poor (the homeless/the zombies) just want a return to normalcy.
No, you wanna know what it was?
None of the "Heroes" died.
A *GOOD* zombie film always has one or more (if not all) of the "Good Guys" die throughout the movie. You need to be shocked. You need to feel threatened. You need to think AT LEAST ONCE during the film "Oh crap! That dude just got bit! ANYBODY COULD DIE AT ANY MOMENT!"
In this film, you knew if the character was gonna live or die just from their introduction. And there were NO SUPRISES. The ad guys all died, the good guys all lived, and I was left with an unsatisfying "And they all lived happily ever after". George Romero films should not leave you like that! They should leave you shaken to your core! You should stumle out of the theater going "Well THAT certainly sucks"!
