Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 2:0	Budget Studio

If you are going to remake a movie it is not a bad idea to have the original director on board.

During a high school baseball game in an absolutely typical small town, the town drunk shows up with a shotgun and a vacant look on his face.  The sheriff is forced to shoot him but soon others are acting oddly as well.  After hearing of a possible plane crash the sheriff and the deputy find the wreckage in the river that supplies the town’s drinking water.  A few quick cuts tell us that the government is aware of the problem and is taking extreme measures to contain it. After the usual close calls the sheriff and his wife seem to escape only to find out that the containment area has been expanded.

The original Crazies was released in 1973 at a time when government distrust was high. The remake was done around the time of worries of a flu epidemic. The films are visually quite different with the new version featuring many of the stylistic splashes that are so prevalent in movies these days. The original, while shot with Romero’s great visual style, is often soft and overly dark partly by choice and partly by budget limitations. Like all Romero movies there are beautifully set up shots that soften us up for the gore and insanity that is sure to come.  The remake is done with the same style. There are multiple scenes that are good enough to frame and hang on your wall. Frequently the camera, which is constantly on the move for most of the film, will be perfectly still and the actor will barely move. A calm before the storm. I am not sure why this is so effective on me but it gets me every time. It is the reason that 'Gothic" is one of my favorite movies and I think it is also what makes "Martin" so effective.

As films continue to evolve different styles and techniques come into vogue. One of the current favorites is what I call the flash swipe. A scene will draw to a close and then there will be a flash of white screen, either a blurry moving image or a quick still shot, another flash of white screen and then on to the next scene.  This is almost always accompanied by swooshing sounds and loud noises. I am not a big fan of this. Used wrong it can really mess with the flow of a movie (and sometimes remind me of the old Batman TV series) and used too often is simply annoying. The director used just about every popular style of camera work but did not go overboard on any of them. Besides the “Use a movie camera to film a still shot” that I mentioned previously, he uses a couple of flash swipes early on but not a lot in the later  part of the film.  As for camera motion, he tries out all of them.  We have the Static shot (no motion), the boom sweep (where the camera is mounted on a crane and is lifted up and away from the scene while zooming out), the shaky cam (popularized in “The Blair Witch”), and the Stedi-Cam (see any ER episode), the wide angle static shot (where we see a character running fast but seeming to be moving slow), the zoom in fly by shot (an aerial shot of the actors) but when push comes to shove in the last bits of the movie, he reverts to a very stable, almost immobile camera and lets us see some of the horror that the couple is encountering.

I’ll be honest, I groaned at the first bit of Shaky cam. One way to cover up a lack of skill on the stunt team is to swing the camera around wildly without bothering to focus it and, if the stuntmen are really bad, flash a strobe light too. However, in this case the different styles of motion were used to convey emotion. Taking Romero’s use of carefully composed static shots as a way to control the pace of a movie, director Breck Eisner really expands on it. The early Shaky cam is only used in the early confrontations with the military which implies a feeling of complete chaos. As the cast starts to get a handle as to what is going on, Eisner switches to the Stedi-Cam which gives us a feeling of controlled panic, still a dangerous situation but at least now we know who the enemy is.  Later when Judy is hiding from the hunter, the camera becomes static again with the only motion the hunter wandering around.

The main storyline is that the Sheriff, David Dutten, (Timothy Olyphant, “Electro Luxx”) and his wife Judy (Radha Mitchell, “Pitch Black”) are trying to get out of the quarantine zone set up by the government to contain the virus that was released by the plane crash.  During the course of their struggle they will encounter a lot of infected people with varying degrees of illness and a fair number of faceless soldiers.  Despite everything that the Feds and the Crazies throw at them, they manage to escape the original containment area only to end up headed towards a city that has also become infected and is now the epicenter of a new containment area.

And here is where I have my biggest problems with the movie. Of all the people in the film these two are the ones who should most clearly side with the Feds. She is a fucking doctor. Sure she is a GP but somewhere during her 8 to 10 years of medical training I am sure she attended a lecture or two about infectious diseases. At one point she suspects that the Feds think the infection is now being spread through the air, so she must have some clue as to the transmission of communicable diseases. And yet what does she do? She tries to break quarantine. Knowing that if she does make it to a population center carrying the virus, thousands or even millions of people could die. Apparently the Hippocratic Oath doesn't apply here.  And David? He’s a cop. He should also have some idea on just how risky what they are doing is to other people. Obviously the mitigating factor here is that the military appears to be killing everyone who was exposed to the virus whether they are showing signs or not. Still there are alternatives to heading to a large population center. Like hiding out for a couple of days to see if they are infected or not. (Definition of Hero: A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life)

A second problem is just exactly how contagious is the virus?  Originally it is spread in the water supply. (This is a little suspect, I thought viruses were extremely susceptible to cold.) Then there is a suggestion that it can be transmitted by air.  You would also expect that contact with bodily fluids might pass the bug along. And yet despite the fact that our heroes are exposed to the virus in all of these ways, they do not get sick. At least we think they don’t.  If the virus was contagious, they should have it.  When the couple captures one of the guys in charge, he does not seem panicked about being in their presence.  He did not seem concerned that he was going to catch the virus. Likely the explanation is that you either get the virus or you don't. If you don't get it from the initial contact, then you are immune to it and contact with infected people will pose no risk.

Which brings us to the military. On the surface quarantining the town is the right choice. However rounding up the entire population of the town and then killing them all does seem a little over the top.  The same way we never find out anything about the virus we also never find anything out about the Feds’ plans. There is a saying that goes “if your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails”.  Well the Feds apparently have hammers that come in progressively larger sizes.  And as they start using the larger ones we feel a shift from containment to cover up.

The film is very much worth seeing. In many ways it is superior to the original; certainly the pacing and visuals are dramatically better. The same lack of definition of the virus and what the Feds are really up to is a key component of both movies and is used to make us sympathetic to the heroes.  Of note, Lynn Lowery has a quick cameo; she is the girl riding the bicycle on the otherwise empty street. Lynn’s character in the original was involved in a sub-plot that was completely dropped in the remake.

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