re:mote voices

Title: Land of the Dead
Cast: Simon Baker, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, Asia Argento, Robert Joy, Eugene Clark, Joanne Boland
Director: George A. Romero

The zombie holocaust is a fact. The post-human age has started. The remains of humanity are shored up on places where the zombie horde can't access them. At the centre of The Land Of The Dead, we have an island city - surrounded by water, and with protected access. The rich life in luxury, in their glorious ivory towers, the poor live closer to squalor.

The film starts with a raiding party, small town zombieville, the living dead go about their every day business. Without warning nasty humans come screaming in with their motorbikes and trucks, creating noise and havoc, and wilfully blowing the heads off of poor zombies. This is how the humans survive, scavenging from various towns - rolling in, grabbing what they can, and getting back to the island.

However, things have changed. The zombies of zombieville are not impressed. The zombies of zombieville are going to put a stop to this kind of behaviour. Gathering together the zombies of zombieville march on the city, determined to air their grievances in a civilized flesh-eating manner. Of course at the same time, humans are a squalid and nasty race, and a group of raiders have fallen out with their bosses.

The Land of the Dead is a mixed film, on the one hand it projects zombie evolution, introducing the possibility that they could be smart, and if zombies were to become smart perhaps they would represent the post-human. In science fiction the likes of Ian McDonald and Peter Hamilton have both dealt with the dead as post-human, reanimated dead taking over overwhelming the human race. On the other hand, this is a post-apocalyptic film, concentrating on the scrabble between groups of humans to try and survive with the limited resources that are left to them.

The Land of the Dead is not entirely your regular zombie film. Sure there are shuffling undead, chewing up people, there are people running around shooting undead. But there are a few little scenes in there that are more humorous, in a nod towards the Sean of the Dead kind of humour. The regular action/zombie stuff is the surface material, the ticking of boxes required to make a film these days. It is the humour, and the little details, and the whole evolution of the post-human zombie that makes The Land of The Dead more interesting.