"This was an important place in their lives."

Hooptober 5.0 #7 (fulfills anniversary and Romero requirements)

Right away, George Romero shows us how different things are going to be this time, now that he's filming in vivid, saturated color: close-up on a very red surface that could easily be blood-soaked flesh. That it turns out to be something as mundane as a wall of soundproofing at a news station is not actually all that comforting: we go right from an implied image of death and decay to a world that is very much unprepared to take seriously the idea that humanity might be doomed.

In Night of the Living Dead, the zombies and their ways were established immediately, urgently, and viscerally. Dawn takes a slightly different, slower approach. We start hearing right away about how the dead are rising and coming after us, but all we actually see for a good fifteen or twenty minutes are regular people up to their usual bullshit, first arguing about methods of fighting zombies at that news station and then in a SWAT raid on a housing project. The racism that was evident but unstated in the first movie is front and center here, with the bigoted white leader of the raid spitting out racial slurs as he dives into apartments and shoots mostly black and Latinx residents, no matter if they're living dead or just living. He's so clearly out of control that he gets tackled pretty quickly by Roger, one of his own guys and one of our protagonists, and then shot dead by another cop, but the implication is pretty clear: under any real strain, most humans will reveal that they are the fucking worst. Also, the SWAT commander gets shot in the chest, not the head, so you know how well that's going to turn out.

After that sequence and a quick check-in with some deputized zombie shooters similar to the assholes we encountered at the end of Night, we spend the rest of our time with four people: that guy Roger and Peter, another cop from the apartment raid, who meet up with Stephen and Fran from the news station and fly away in a weather helicopter. (Peter is black, so, just like last time, the smartest and most sympathetic character is a resourceful black man with a resistance to taking any shit.) There's a tense scene in which the helicopter needs to be refueled before they go anywhere, and I was immediately reminded of how well things went during a refueling attempt in the previous movie. Fortunately, it works out a little better this time. Late on, the vehicle's propeller even gets to participate in a zombie encounter, probably my all-time favorite violent use of aircraft blades outside of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Then our heroes touch down at a shopping mall, where they will spend most of the rest of the movie, and this is where things get really ingenious. All four of them go a little crazy in different ways over the sudden abundance of food, clothing, and stuff available to them, and there's a whole long interlude of comedic shenanigans in which they go about getting supplies and avoiding or killing the dead folk who have wandered back to one of the central locations of their human lives. They actually make a home out of this ugly, artificial place, and the first of them to die (it's not really spoiling anything in this genre to say that not everyone will make it out alive and well, right?) gets buried in the mall garden. Once they've developed a sense of normalcy, some very dangerous feelings of safety and ownership come all too naturally.

It takes a while to figure out what Romero is up to: not just a straightforward satire of commercialism and materialism, though that's definitely going on at some level, but a whole examination of what it means to survive and what kinds of catastrophes are actually worth surviving. At what point in the apocalypse does the world we know become so irrecoverable that we might be better off dead? In some of his characters' decisions, it's not hard to see Romero asking us questions about that and maybe even having an argument with himself over it.

Yeah. So. This is brilliant, the greatest balance of gory scares with social and existential commentary I've ever seen in my life. Also, there's a frickin' pie fight between zombies and a biker gang near the end. I'm not even kidding.