It has been 30 years since Day of the Dead made its way into theatres. 30 years! Just realizing that makes me feel so old. The rental store wouldn't have been complete without a copy of Day or Dawn of the Dead. My dvd/blu collection wouldn't be complete without it. I can say that since I picked up my copy of Day of the Dead, I have watched the film three times, and the documentary twice. That's how much I like it. It is the kind of film that isn't necessarily fun like Dawn; it isn't comical. It has anger and rage.
Romero wasn't feeling all kindly towards the military in this film. Phew, they were quite hard to stomach. Even the one we are supposed to symphatize with (a whining pussbag the lead heroine is romantically aligned to; this is sad, considering of all the men possible to fall for, this piece of weasly dirt) is a bit of a scumbag. The music, the "isolation" symbolized in the lead actress' nightmare, and the arms bursting forth to grab her...even in a room with seemingly no way in, the dead find a way. It is a scene that grabs, doesn't it. Then going into Miami, with the debris, including a newspaper with "The Dead Walk" on the cover, and the alligator walking the street, as supplies were needed.
I think Day polarizes due to its bleak, bleak view of what the apocalypse has done. I don't know what Rhodes was like prior to when we are introduced to him. Maybe the film does him a disservice? Maybe he wasn't an absolute shitbag before this film unveils his wretched, putrid, toxic mug and personality to us in his very first scene.
Let's face it: these guys have been through hell. "Frankenstein" (Richard Liberty), the scientist trying to learn of a way to "humanize the dead" (but, honestly, like Rhodes, I'm not sure what he was like prior to all the death and despair burdened upon them due to the apocalypse), keeps them at bay, but the ending shouldn't surprise any of us.
I think when you are the "group with authority and the gun" as civility collapses around you, as what makes us human dissipates, it allows certain privileges. Eventually those that don't have much (if any) power are bound to suffer. Rhodes is just so far gone by the time we meet him. He's a millstone around the neck of the "pilots of the whirlybird" and the lead heroine (a scientist who is unlike Frankenstein; she isn't able to just pine away in a lab, but her job is to keep the soldiers from totally obliterating those not in their group). They are on borrowed time.
I think you feel this. The lead heroine is on the precipise looking over the cliff. We feel her clinging to her own humanity, to sanity, to whatever hope that is still left. God, what she must endure in this film.
I think the ending could very well be "just a dream", a way to give some relief to the viewer. Is it real? Why not? I mean, after what the heroine goes through for the entire running time...why not a paradise?
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