From Punk Planet, 2004.
Of the many sad chores of adulthood, not many are as poignant as the trampling of childhood terrors. If you were ten during the Carter years, for example, you may have been traumatized by twin taboos known as The Sex Pistols and Dawn Of The Dead. Both hung from the overhead adult world as unexplained anomalies, obscene in their impenetrability. What kind of adults trafficked in such weirdness? None that I knew. Blink and suddenly it’s 1997 and I’m clapping like a rube at the encore of a Sex Pistols reunion concert in San Francisco. Blink again and it’s 2004 and I’m in a theater full of teen-agers, wondering why I just shelled out $9 to see the remake of Dawn Of The Dead. In the bland hands of Jeep commercial director Zack Snyder, DOTD ‘04 is only barely distinguishable from the trailers before it, one long, expensive fart of explosions and rap-metal and ugly people doing unpleasant things.
Except for those first ten minutes. The first ten minutes of this movie scared me. A lot. The action is straightforward enough. Actress Sarah Polley wakes up in her suburban home, escapes her freshly dead boyfriend and emerges onto her front lawn to discover that civilization has fallen apart. For such an abusively crummy flick, this first scene seems spliced from the phantom world that lurks just below the post 9/11 universe. One day you wake up and things are burning and people are trying to kill you. “If I had done the opening 10 minutes and opening credits of the Dawn of the Dead remake,” Quentin Tarantino recently told the LA Weekly, “I’d be very proud.”
Maybe it’s a stupid observation, but there’s less fantasy here than I’d like. For Rwandans, dawn of the dead fell on the morning of April 7, 1994, when Hutus, mobilizing after the plane crash of president Habyarimana, began killing their fellow Tutsis. There is a western view of that genocide as a rural affair. But its mechanics were at least as urban as those first ten minutes of the Dawn remake. Writer Phillip Gourevitch probed the ‘94 massacre from four years in the future, and his description seems cinematically familiar.
Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes, and colleagues hacked colleagues to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients and schoolteachers killed their pupils.
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