This post was written by Hatchet Reporter Joshua Hock.
AMC Georgetown Loews – (Sci-Fi, Horror; R)
The Cold War is over, but Breck Eisner apparently never got the message.
The director’s newest release, “The Crazies,” is a remake of the George Romero cult classic by the same name. And while the update is a heart-thumping thrill of movie, it might be just a little bit of an anachronism.
Like most science fiction writers of his era, Romero focused his socio-political commentary on problems like “the bomb” and cultural conformity. Fortunately though, his is a bygone era: we’re less worried that Russia’s going to drop a bomb than that Iran’s going to make one.
It’s curious then to see that Eisner stuck with Romero’s original anti-military theme: in both films, a military plane carrying a biological weapon crashes into a small town water source. The weapon does what it’s supposed to and destabilizes the population, causing residents to either die or go mad. Suddenly, the military sweeps in and, to avoid a disastrous problem for its public relations department, secretly quarantines the town.
The rest is fairly predictable, because things pretty much follow the same course that they did in the original movie. There are some distinct differences, of course: the remake cuts out one of the best characters – the mad scientist, whose comic relief prevents the film from becoming too preachy. In fact, Eisner is much stronger with the talky anti-military stuff than Romero, whose original work introduced some of the commanding officers as heroic protagonists. The soldiers of the new version are masked, “fire-breathing” monsters who make perfectly clear who the real crazies are supposed to be.
The very best science-fiction offers some sort of social commentary; that is partly what defines the genre. Remakes are therefore entirely appropriate: they update the message behind the movie so that it can have meaning for a new generation of audience members—consider as an ideal example, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
But all that Eisner changes is the special effects, and while those are certainly worth an update once in awhile, their best application is probably not to promote a message that belongs 30 or 40 years in the past.
“The Crazies” is recommended to fans of other Romero remakes like “Dawn of the Dead” (2004) and “Day of the Dead” (2008).