Zack Snyder takes the survivors of a zombie outbreak to a deserted shopping mall and loots George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead in this 2004 remake.

It takes a staggering lack of self-awareness to do a cash-grab Hollywood remake of Romero’s 1978 takedown of consumerism. At least it has enough awareness not to retread those themes given the circumstances, instead delivering a straightforward fast-zombie action movie with a couple of impressive sequences – but nothing as impressive as managing to entirely miss the point of the in-no-way-subtle original.

Where Romero asked “What have we done to ourselves?”, Snyder asks “How cool is this?!” in his deployment of headshots, explosions and souped-up battle buses. There is no sense of sadness when characters have to shoot their infected friends, because the debut director just thinks it’s awesome to see their heads explode. All of Romero’s social commentary and subversive humanity is transplanted by Snyder’s cruelty, usually directed towards fat people and pregnant women.

James Gunn’s script (at least in the edit) doesn’t even bother introducing half the characters, so immaterial are they to the film’s pursuit of Resident Evil-style thudding zombie destruction. Towards the end, two characters who haven’t had a single conversation turn out to be romantically involved. Maybe it makes sense in the Snyder Cut. The only evidence Snyder has seen the original is that he includes a similar montage of the survivors having fun in the mall (mainly to crowbar in a sex scene), except it has no irony because he doesn’t know what that is.

This is Dawn of the Dead told from the point of view of the “shoot ’em in the head!” characters that Romero saw as inhumane, and Snyder sees as heroes.