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Sorry to all those in advance who have come to enjoy my witty, unmerciful surgerys of Hollywood slide shows because I beg for your pardon.
As one of the biggest Romero fans on the board (if not the biggest) you would expect me to know everything about the movie already in detail with along side ofcourse knowing every line which I can recite any time on demand.
This unfortunately is not the case and frankly was out of my control. As some of you know, Romero's movie was originally planned to be a Halloween release but was moved and changed to a summer release (which I thought was foolish). This interfered with my pre-planned schedule. I would be down in South Carolina training to be one of America's soldiers then, consequentally cheating me out of the chance to see for the first (and possibly last time) a Romero DEAD FILM.
The Army didn't work out anyway for once again reasons out of my control leaving me with nothing but severe depression and the worst summer of my young life.
I did however get to see the movie (if you can call a lousy quality 'Ares' download actually seeing it) but only with a big enough experience to give you guys some wacky sort-of Review...(Perhaps a better Review later)
I had gotten a copy of the screenplay several months in advance off of Moviesonline.ca. I was surprised at how closely the Movie followed the screenplay, me thinking the movie would be radically different or at least somewhat different or more worked out but it was pretty much word for word with the screenplay.
Knowing that I had a terrible presentation with the movie, some of my thoughts will come from the screenplay since I can't fairly comment on many of the movies attributes, most notably the Special FX.
I didn't see the movie until after the credits which is a dissapointment because I was interested in What Romero would do in the first few minutes of the movie. The Zombie's acting I didn't really like. I'll tell you that straight out. The actors seemed to try to hard and live up to a falsely believed standard that could best be described as a shallow reemerging of an old Franchise (Ahem). The best part I can give to exclaim this is right in the beginning when all the zombies on frame are gathered in a gazebo trying to play instruments. If you watch the zombie with the tamboreen, he seems to not be in character as a free-thinking zombie but more as a machine (a dead one too) mechanically using the tamboreen with a body language suggesting in an elementary level that this movie is great and new when what it really needs is free-thinking, fully dedicated creative actors which I don't think the movie had.
I don't know all the actor's names off the top of my head but the lead, Riley only seemed to be fully involved with the movie in some instances. I'll tell you, I think Cholo was more dedicated to the movie in his performance than Riley was but was unfortunately less skilled at handling his camera performance.
I think most of the young actors (aside from Argento ofcourse and some others) acted in the movie like they were just using it to hopefully further their career. That's the problem with more known actors. They don't always take their projects seriously because at any given time they'll be working on several projects with one being their favorite, most worth-while and most time consuming.
I think some lesser more dedicated actors would have benefited this movie.
The script for Land of the Dead, I'll tell you right now, I wasn't magnificently impressed with. It was short, somewhat predictable, had not lousy but unworthy, subpar project diologue that made the franchise seem to be burning out and not coming alive again, that's for sure. One thing I love about Romero's movies is not just the action and the settings, commentary, etcetera is the way he can use simple diologue to illustrate the zombie epidemic's effect on society and the way the surviving feel about that and also how their present life sits with them. There was a lack of that brilliance in this movie. I reason I think there was is not because Romero is getting old but because Romero made the mistake of having the city try to ignore the problem, shunning out the zombies as the biggest protagonist effecting their daily lives and replacing it with Kaufman (a parallel of George Bush to a certain extant) which I felt made the feeling of despair in the character's lose its lackluster.
Aside from that, I didn't think the movie had enough of the Roadwarrior influence in it like promised and I think it should have been done in the day time. Because one of the cool things about Romero's zombies is they aren't susceptible to the rays of the sun or are effected by the day time. It didn't really make sense to me why Romero made almost the whole movie at night and it certainly didn't make any sense to have their scavenger expedition scheduled for after hours either. And the movie was way too short. Way way way way way way way too short. One of his DEAD movies hasn't been made since 1985 and he gives us a 90 minute cookie crumb. The movie also suffered from Lack of detail and illustration (even on Romero's terms cutting down even more the zombies' role as a protagonist). We didn't get much of a characterization of Kaufman. He was pretty much a flat character like most of them. Day of the Dead suffered from the same problem but it was made like that so the only whole characters were the decent people trying to escape (Billy, John, and Sarah and to a lesser extant Fisher). In Land, it appears he's scaled it down even more so that it's hard to tell exactly who is the free thinking character.
Back to the zombies, I didn't understand why they looked like zombies from Dawn of the Dead's chronological period of the epidemic (but with much better makeup work of course). Day of the Dead's zombies were rotted terribly. The two reasons I can come up with for this is either it's because Day of the Dead takes place five years after the first zombie walked or Because the Sun in Florida had damaged their skin much more rapidly. The zombies seemed too fresh and functioned more as a mechanical team than a group of individual zombies working together as a team. I liked it better when they were all free-thinking individual zombies.
I also hated Bid Daddy. The whole idea of having a leader for the zombies was hard for me to digest. I mean what next, a chain of command? I thought it was kind of silly how he tried to motivate the other dead to coordinate an attack on the Road Warriors and more silly to coordinate an attack on the city. It just seemed dumb to me and the wrong direction for Romero. It didn't work for me at all. I think He should have stuck to atmosphere, illustration and detail to have his movie prevail in quality in the rest of them. I think that's what the other movies lacked and what his movies did. It appears in the second wave of the zombie era, the trend was to make the zombies more fierce and Romero competed with that for lack of better words with having the zombies work together?? I understand there's a whole underlying reason and story for this but I think it failed miserably theatrically speaking. he shoul've stuck to detail in describing what the world was like, how they lived and focused more on a sociological perspective as well as interelationships instead of using three sentences to characterize the relationship between two character's. He should've talked more about the different groups of people in the city, unions, etc. what the FatCats were like in their perspective and then what the fatcats were really like and why they had to do what they had to do. Romero's commentary was seemingly shallow and only twisted the skeleton of his movie for the worse. An example of what I would've done is I wouldve had some of the main chatacter's in one scene sitting on the roof of a modestly tall apartment building in the sun having lunch (or their version of lunch) talking about what it is to live in the City of the Dead. A big part of it would be about the organization of the city and what people are entitled to do and get in return. What's fair and what's not fair as well as the zombie problem and the administrative concearns. This movie appeared to suffer the same problem as some of the other new ones, you never cared about the character;s or many of them. Just because Romero's script hints to you that Riley is supposed to be a good guy doesn't make it so. It takes action to prove this and social illustration which was always the weak point. I would suggest something like The Crow meets Pulp Fiction meets Mad Max meets Dawn of the Dead. That's a nice cocktail for the fourth Romero flick.
Only thing I can say is I hope he comes out with another one and gets it right but I fear this time around it could be even harder to get an investor to pony up the dough.
As one of the biggest Romero fans on the board (if not the biggest) you would expect me to know everything about the movie already in detail with along side ofcourse knowing every line which I can recite any time on demand.
This unfortunately is not the case and frankly was out of my control. As some of you know, Romero's movie was originally planned to be a Halloween release but was moved and changed to a summer release (which I thought was foolish). This interfered with my pre-planned schedule. I would be down in South Carolina training to be one of America's soldiers then, consequentally cheating me out of the chance to see for the first (and possibly last time) a Romero DEAD FILM.
The Army didn't work out anyway for once again reasons out of my control leaving me with nothing but severe depression and the worst summer of my young life.
I did however get to see the movie (if you can call a lousy quality 'Ares' download actually seeing it) but only with a big enough experience to give you guys some wacky sort-of Review...(Perhaps a better Review later)
I had gotten a copy of the screenplay several months in advance off of Moviesonline.ca. I was surprised at how closely the Movie followed the screenplay, me thinking the movie would be radically different or at least somewhat different or more worked out but it was pretty much word for word with the screenplay.
Knowing that I had a terrible presentation with the movie, some of my thoughts will come from the screenplay since I can't fairly comment on many of the movies attributes, most notably the Special FX.
I didn't see the movie until after the credits which is a dissapointment because I was interested in What Romero would do in the first few minutes of the movie. The Zombie's acting I didn't really like. I'll tell you that straight out. The actors seemed to try to hard and live up to a falsely believed standard that could best be described as a shallow reemerging of an old Franchise (Ahem). The best part I can give to exclaim this is right in the beginning when all the zombies on frame are gathered in a gazebo trying to play instruments. If you watch the zombie with the tamboreen, he seems to not be in character as a free-thinking zombie but more as a machine (a dead one too) mechanically using the tamboreen with a body language suggesting in an elementary level that this movie is great and new when what it really needs is free-thinking, fully dedicated creative actors which I don't think the movie had.
I don't know all the actor's names off the top of my head but the lead, Riley only seemed to be fully involved with the movie in some instances. I'll tell you, I think Cholo was more dedicated to the movie in his performance than Riley was but was unfortunately less skilled at handling his camera performance.
I think most of the young actors (aside from Argento ofcourse and some others) acted in the movie like they were just using it to hopefully further their career. That's the problem with more known actors. They don't always take their projects seriously because at any given time they'll be working on several projects with one being their favorite, most worth-while and most time consuming.
I think some lesser more dedicated actors would have benefited this movie.
The script for Land of the Dead, I'll tell you right now, I wasn't magnificently impressed with. It was short, somewhat predictable, had not lousy but unworthy, subpar project diologue that made the franchise seem to be burning out and not coming alive again, that's for sure. One thing I love about Romero's movies is not just the action and the settings, commentary, etcetera is the way he can use simple diologue to illustrate the zombie epidemic's effect on society and the way the surviving feel about that and also how their present life sits with them. There was a lack of that brilliance in this movie. I reason I think there was is not because Romero is getting old but because Romero made the mistake of having the city try to ignore the problem, shunning out the zombies as the biggest protagonist effecting their daily lives and replacing it with Kaufman (a parallel of George Bush to a certain extant) which I felt made the feeling of despair in the character's lose its lackluster.
Aside from that, I didn't think the movie had enough of the Roadwarrior influence in it like promised and I think it should have been done in the day time. Because one of the cool things about Romero's zombies is they aren't susceptible to the rays of the sun or are effected by the day time. It didn't really make sense to me why Romero made almost the whole movie at night and it certainly didn't make any sense to have their scavenger expedition scheduled for after hours either. And the movie was way too short. Way way way way way way way too short. One of his DEAD movies hasn't been made since 1985 and he gives us a 90 minute cookie crumb. The movie also suffered from Lack of detail and illustration (even on Romero's terms cutting down even more the zombies' role as a protagonist). We didn't get much of a characterization of Kaufman. He was pretty much a flat character like most of them. Day of the Dead suffered from the same problem but it was made like that so the only whole characters were the decent people trying to escape (Billy, John, and Sarah and to a lesser extant Fisher). In Land, it appears he's scaled it down even more so that it's hard to tell exactly who is the free thinking character.
Back to the zombies, I didn't understand why they looked like zombies from Dawn of the Dead's chronological period of the epidemic (but with much better makeup work of course). Day of the Dead's zombies were rotted terribly. The two reasons I can come up with for this is either it's because Day of the Dead takes place five years after the first zombie walked or Because the Sun in Florida had damaged their skin much more rapidly. The zombies seemed too fresh and functioned more as a mechanical team than a group of individual zombies working together as a team. I liked it better when they were all free-thinking individual zombies.
I also hated Bid Daddy. The whole idea of having a leader for the zombies was hard for me to digest. I mean what next, a chain of command? I thought it was kind of silly how he tried to motivate the other dead to coordinate an attack on the Road Warriors and more silly to coordinate an attack on the city. It just seemed dumb to me and the wrong direction for Romero. It didn't work for me at all. I think He should have stuck to atmosphere, illustration and detail to have his movie prevail in quality in the rest of them. I think that's what the other movies lacked and what his movies did. It appears in the second wave of the zombie era, the trend was to make the zombies more fierce and Romero competed with that for lack of better words with having the zombies work together?? I understand there's a whole underlying reason and story for this but I think it failed miserably theatrically speaking. he shoul've stuck to detail in describing what the world was like, how they lived and focused more on a sociological perspective as well as interelationships instead of using three sentences to characterize the relationship between two character's. He should've talked more about the different groups of people in the city, unions, etc. what the FatCats were like in their perspective and then what the fatcats were really like and why they had to do what they had to do. Romero's commentary was seemingly shallow and only twisted the skeleton of his movie for the worse. An example of what I would've done is I wouldve had some of the main chatacter's in one scene sitting on the roof of a modestly tall apartment building in the sun having lunch (or their version of lunch) talking about what it is to live in the City of the Dead. A big part of it would be about the organization of the city and what people are entitled to do and get in return. What's fair and what's not fair as well as the zombie problem and the administrative concearns. This movie appeared to suffer the same problem as some of the other new ones, you never cared about the character;s or many of them. Just because Romero's script hints to you that Riley is supposed to be a good guy doesn't make it so. It takes action to prove this and social illustration which was always the weak point. I would suggest something like The Crow meets Pulp Fiction meets Mad Max meets Dawn of the Dead. That's a nice cocktail for the fourth Romero flick.
Only thing I can say is I hope he comes out with another one and gets it right but I fear this time around it could be even harder to get an investor to pony up the dough.
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