Movie Review - The Dead (2010)

 

Let's be honest here - zombie films are notorious for their generic qualities. When's the last time you tuned in to a zombie flick expecting something new or exciting to happen? I know that it's been a while for me, and that's because the genre has become so overloaded with cheap low-budget flicks looking to mock their own favorite zombie movies. The Ford brothers have attempted to reinvent the zombie genre yet again with The Dead, a zombie film set in the midst of Africa during an outbreak of disease.

The setting of the film is one of its most important features, not just because of the realism of each desert shot but because it focuses the social commentary. The zombies in The Dead are mostly black, and although some video games have come under fire for their depiction of race, The Dead works to showcase the poor conditions of Africa and the resiliency of those who live there. The Fords don't necessarily dwell on their own political allegories, and one can certainly overlook much of the film's commentary and write it off as a coincidence that the zombie apocalypse is set in Africa. But there are moments of stand-out metaphor, such as the shared journey between white protagonist Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) and African Daniel Dembele (Prince David Oseia), or the prospect of hope symbolized by a necklace given to Dembele's son as Murphy stands to fight with him.

 

The settings are gorgeously shot, with an eye for color (and by color I mean the vast range of orange and red that the hot sun and sand can evoke). Zombie extras dot the landscape in almost every shot, even climbing a hill as Murphy makes his way towards the camera. These little pieces add a hopelessness to the film, an extra amount of detail that goes a long way towards making The Dead's character quests depressingly bleak. There's a quality to the scenery that reminds me a lot of old Italian zombie films. And thanks to some impressingly good special effects, the intense gore also triggers that sense of nostalgia.

But by the same token, The Dead often shambles like the zombies in the film. Murphy and Zembele join up, heading towards an air base and attempting to find a military outpost where Zembele's son is supposed to be. Along the way, the two hijack a truck and go off-roading through the sands, risking axles and gas in order to make good speed out of Africa. But there are zombies everywhere, dead who have wandered from villages far and wide for the chance to rip into living flesh. And with these dead comes a stall in the film, a routine of Murphy Zembele being forced to settle down for the night, being surprised by a zombie attack, and making it out alive. It's a process that repeats multiple times during the middle of the film, where the truck breaks down or they get stuck in a rut or they must make a run for from zombies who quickly closed around them. While these scenes can be tense, they're often just filler, used to take up some more time on a journey that ultimately seems out of reach. 

Yet despite these lulls, The Dead is often poignant and compellingly depressive. And though the finale seems to lead us to the same futile position in which we began our journey, one thing has changed - that despite the dangers of Africa, we can join together, accept equality, because home is no longer there. When countries finally dissolve into what they are - simply bordering territories of land - people forget cultural and societal differences, and accept all of humanity.