Efficient is not a word you can often use to describe the cultishly revered multiplex visions of Zack Snyder. The director who gave DC’s brightest, most popular superheroes a dreary messiah-complex makeover has spent most of his career slowing genre fare down. Like, way down: His signature move, established in the Spartan death-march blockbuster 300, is rendering titanic combat in near tableaux, with action scenes that creep like mythic molasses, evoking not just the grandeur but also the essential stillness of a comic-book splash panel. His most recent movie, the first installment of a Netflix Stars Wars mockbuster, contains so much bombastic slow motion that a cut without it would probably end an hour sooner.
This wasn’t always the case in Snyder Land. Once upon a time, the divisive director favored kinetic speed over the glacial hero-pose crawl that’s come to define his rock-chord epics. In fact, the most common complaint lobbed at his first feature was that it was actually too fast — or, more specifically, that it took movie monsters renowned for their dreadfully deliberate shuffle and gave them the velocity of Olympic sprinters.
His Dawn of the Dead, which was released in theaters 20 years ago, is not some secret modern classic. It’s no match for the film it updates: George Romero’s 1978 masterpiece, which transported the claustrophobic dread of his earlier Night of the Living Dead to a suburban shopping mall and a new decade of zombie-like consumerism and Me Generation self-interest. Written by a young James Gunn, Snyder’s version expands the body count and caffeinates the thrills, swapping out the slow-advancing threat of Romero’s hungry hordes for the speed-demon scramble Danny Boyle lent his ghouls in the previous year’s 28 Days Later. This Dawn fits all too neatly into a decade of horror remakes that confused MTV-influenced sensory overload for urgency, and which often sacrificed the sharp political consciences of their source material on the altar of slick 21st-century carnage. It both amps up and dumbs down Romero’s seminal apocalyptic tale.
Still, for a few minutes, it was possible to wonder if nu-Dawn might land in the same league as its canonized predecessor. And that’s because Snyder, a commercial director moving brashly into cinema, came out swinging. The first ten minutes of the movie are an almost self-contained nightmare, imagining the start of the zombie apocalypse as a sudden, stomach-dropping lurch into anarchy. They’re also the most thrilling ten minutes of Snyder’s whole filmography — and, in their ruthless economy, a glimmer of the rough-and-tumble master of horror he might have become had his interests not drifted toward biblically heavy graphic-novel spectacles.
While Romero began with the world already in flames (Dawn was set in the immediate aftermath of Night’s events), Snyder drops us into the hours right before everything goes to hell. His heroine, an exhausted nurse played by Sarah Polley, catches and mostly ignores stray hints of what’s coming — talk of patients with unusual symptoms, an ominous report running on a TV. There’s something chillingly realistic about how the signs of impending calamity disappear into the background noise of modern life, tuned out like so much bad news. Snyder’s Dawn hasn’t aged so much in that respect: Though social media would probably affect the speed in which people became hip to the fact that the end was nigh, it’s possible that the sheer volume of doomscrolling options today might leave everyone uncertain as to how seriously they should be taking incoming word of dashing, flesh-eating corpses.
With the same briskness that he establishes the hectic work life and cozy home life of Polley’s Ana, Snyder completely shatters both. No more than five minutes elapse before a grotesquely disfigured child — killed and resurrected offscreen — stumbles in to make short work of her husband’s jugular; it’s the threat coming home in visceral terms, spreading from neighbor to life partner in a matter of seconds. While Snyder would later play with the technique known as “speedramping,†in which the velocity of action is toggled from slow to fast and back again within a single shot, he applies a more analog version of that principle over the course of this harrowing home invasion: Bursts of carnage give way to pockets of suspense as Ana is launched backward from bedroom to bathroom, out of frying pan and into fire, a single fragile door creating all too temporary sanctuary.
Snyder didn’t really gain his reputation as a gifted post-modern image-maker — a kind of Renaissance painter of rippling, steroidal digital warfare — until his next movie, 300. Without that movie’s cinematographer, Larry Fong, behind the camera, Dawn of the Dead looks flatter, cheaper, and less extravagantly iconic. But there’s still a panoramic awe to the suburban chaos Ana staggers out into, as the director’s camera whips around a cul-de-sac engulfed in flames, catching stray glimpses of madness, like a car careening off the road into a fireball explosion and strangers sprinting from their manicured lawns to the false safety of their garages with hungry neighbors in hot pursuit.
There’s also a certain video-game quality to how Snyder orchestrates this pre-credits doomsday crescendo. He emphasizes the labyrinth-like precarity of the neighborhood’s layout in godlike overhead shots and locks the camera in place on Ana’s getaway car once she starts navigating the ravaged streets (a shooting strategy that can’t help but look like a precursor to the superficially similar prologue of the Playstation best seller The Last of Us and its recent HBO adaptation). Far from diminishing the thrill of the sequence, his style lends it the unreality of a nightmare from which you can’t awaken.
What sticks out, again, is the gut-wrenching speed. The athletic swiftness of the undead sets the pace of this opening descent into Hell on Earth. Or maybe Snyder is matching the rate with which a virus of this nature would tear polite society apart. Either way, there’s an immediacy to the violence that he’d quickly abandon on his gradual climb to the summit of a comic-book Mount Olympus. These days, Snyder tends to turn every punch or fired bullet into a small eternity, like an instant replay progressing frame by carefully composed frame. It’s a style far removed from how he embraced messy, blinding confusion in Dawn of the Dead, an amphetamine to his later sedatives.
The coup de grâce is the credits sequence that follows this slam-bang cold open. To the strum of Johnny Cash’s late-career, Book of Revelations anthem “When the Man Comes Around,†the director depicts the collapse of civilization as a jittery montage of alarming news footage: We get a press conference distressingly free of useful information, shock cuts of camcorder savagery, and faux-documentary clips of huge crowds fleeing the recently deceased. It’s a vision of armageddon as seen through the scrim of mass media — which is to say, how we all might experience it before the zombies racing across our screens became the ones rushing into our homes. Snyder’s nihilism is much glibber than Romero’s, but there’s real bite to how he imagines the end of the world as a scary blur of digital information. The apocalypse will be televised, the movie promises.
In the end, Dawn’s beginning is a momentous tease, misleading in its ragged intensity and, yes, efficiency. Those superb opening minutes, packing a whole global collapse into a blaze of blood, fear, and folksy country-legend accompaniment, promise a better movie than the apolitically frenetic, arcade-splatter remake Snyder ends up delivering. A better career, too: 20 years later, Snyder has built a loyal following around his singularly grandiose approach to pulp entertainment without quite topping the primal debut expression of it.