YMMV / Dawn of the Dead (2004)

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• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Bart generally comes off as an unlikable putz for most of his screentime, but it's hard not to feel sorry for him when we see his utter horror at realizing he's been bitten and hear his pitiful begging for C.J. not to leave him behind while zombies close in on him.
• Awesome Music:
  • The use of Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around" over the title credits and Jim Carroll's "People Who Died" over the end credits.
  • Richard Cheese's version of "Down With The Sickness" too.
  • The Hangman’s Song, which plays during the A-Team Montage, is morbidly epic.
• Broken Base: Among zombie-movie fans, whether this or the original Dawn is "better". There is also a subset of this which feel that as a movie itself it is fine, but being billed as a new Dawn of the Dead caused more headaches than necessary. As a point, some believe the exact same movie with a different name (thus turning a few examples of Mythology Gag into Shout-Out) would have been just as enjoyable and nipped a whole rush of arguments in one go.
• Damsel Scrappy: Nicole, whose stupidity forces them to prematurely flee from the safety of the mall (though Steve shares equal blame). Unlike Steve however, she survives right to the end.
  • Also worth noting that Steve is meant to be a Love to Hate Jerk with a Heart of Jerk. Him being a stupid, selfish asshole fits. On the other hand, Nicole is meant to be one of the likeable characters, so her poor decision making is a lot more infuriating.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • C.J. and Kenneth's Awesome Moments, Character Development, and charming performances make them the film's most popular characters and make it easy to forget that neither of them is The Hero or Deuteragonist.
  • Of the truck survivors, Tucker is considered a likable character who provides some good humor and gets a couple of action scenes that are a lot better than those of the average Mauve Shirt.
• Friendly Fandoms: Zack Snyder fans and James Gunn fans who are sick of the schism caused by the fandoms of their respective comic book films often take refuge under the fact that the two collaborated on this film, to surprisingly good results even. The fact that the two directors remain friends to this day because of their work on this film is also often brought up in attempts to mend the rivalry.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The security guards hold the protagonists in contempt for destroying a fictional store called Metropolis upon entering the mall. Around a decade later, Zack Snyder had these exact same complaints leveled at him – twice.
  • The third act of the film ups the action by having the characters leave the mall to avoid going mad from isolation. Fast forward to another Zack Snyder film where the characters are already mad - and imagine themselves as gun-toting action heroines. One of the sequences involves zombies too.
  • Seeing Lindy Booth as a sweet Damsel in Distress becomes rather amusing as she'd eventually get typecast into playing murderers. Likewise she ends up trapped in a gun shop, which makes it hard not to think of Cry_Wolf where she plants a gun to frame someone for murder and then fools everyone with her Nice Girl façade.
• Nausea Fuel: Like in the original.
• One-Scene Wonder: Matt Frewer and his character's early death scene.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • When did Phil Dunphy become such a jerk?
  • Both the director and the writer would go on to direct some Super Hero films.
  • The irony of Pestilence Catching a super infectious plague.
  • It seems Elsa from Splice survived against zombies before surviving against Dren.
  • Sarah Polley has been directing and producing TV shows, films and documentaries after the 2010s.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Looking at this version, a lot of the CG shots are pretty apparent (especially in the scene where society collapses around Ana as she's escaping from her neighborhood). Takes away a bit from the scare factor.
  • In the DVD commentary, director Zack Snyder cheerfully points out a specific example- when they cobbled together the overhead shot of Ana's neighborhood via CGI, they failed to give some of the houses any street access.
  • While the scene with C.J., Michael and Kenneth fighting zombies together and setting them on fire comes with spectacular stunt performances, due to all the zombies in the scene being long-haired, it's very obvious they have their hair covered in huge amount of the fire retardant gel.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Monica (who doesn't even get named until the end credits) and Tucker get less screen time, plot relevance, and Character Development than their fellow survivors from the truck, even though many fans like them far better than Nicole, Steve, Norma, and Glen. Monica's pathetic and random death scene doesn't help.
    • To make it worse, at least in the case of Monica, Word of God confirmed that she had a much larger part in the plot during the initial filming. Most of her scenes were either re-shot or outright cut, reducing her to a nameless extra.
  • Some people wish the zombie baby had been kept alive longer, in order to explore whether it was dangerous and to provide more insight into the nature of the virus.
• Too Cool to Live: During the finale C.J. pulls a Heroic Sacrifice and Michael opts to blow his head off rather than succumb to infection. Possibly also Kenneth, given the ambigious ending, Andy also counts, being a crack shot with a sniper rifle, and seems to bond with Kenneth over their signboard converations; sadly, due to the attempt at getting him food, he gets infected and turns, leaving Kenneth to pull a Boom, Headshot! on him.
• Vindicated by History: While the movie made a good profit and fared decently with most critics, it was also seen as another example of a mediocre remake that changed too much to satisfy a modern audience in the eyes of fans of the original. As time passed, however, it’s been re-evaluated as a solid remake in its own right, often compared to other horror remakes such as The Thing (1982) and Suspiria (2018) in how it tells a different story with updated central themes while using the original movie's framework, rather than simply re-telling the same story with a Setting Update and inevitably forcing comparisons to the 1978 classic. Nowadays, it’s recognized as one of the better movie remakes.

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