Two Reflections on The Dawn of the Dead

In the great remake of Dawn of the Dead as well as in the original, the protagonists say things like, "let's just wait for someone to come and save us." These remarks come early in the story before it becomes all too clear that no one is coming.

I wondered if these films, and a number of others just like them, have contributed to the self-sufficient and survivalist mentality which many folks espouse today. Growing up with movies like this, especially as young impressionable people, could partly explain the attraction of the Libertarian philosophy which eschews dependence on the government.

Whether the attitudes of today's gun-rights extremists came as a result of these films or if the films came as a way of portraying these attitudes already present in the society, it doesn't matter.  What matters is they're ZOMBIE MOVIES, not reality.

Another reflection I had was, since we're going to take these films so seriously, the supposed instructions that police receive to always shoot COM, center of mass, is nonsense. So often I've questioned whether it was necessary for the cops to shoot someone in the chest rather than in an arm or leg.  Always the defenders of shooting people say they have to shoot center of mass otherwise it's too easy to miss.

Well, re-watching this great movie, I realized that's just not so. The heroes of the story discovered that they had to shoot the zombies in the head, only head shots would stop them from rising again.  And in the remake they didn't just rise again zombie-style, they jumped up and attacked furiously.

There was no COM injunction, there were just heads exploding one after the other, which is proof positive that the police don't have to kill people when they don't want to. Just like shooting zombies in the head, they could shoot that drunk and dangerous armed maniac in the shoulder of his shooting arm.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.