The good news: nothing much in the film got terribly close to much in Pandemic, for once. The last couple of major zombiefilms have managed to step on things going into the novel. Not really in any huge way; just in ways making me go Hey! at the screen. LotD has little to do with my concept...except that the guy making the film invented the genre itself. But that's another matter.

The better news: the film worked.

For those following Romero's storyline [who have probably already seen this thing], Land is essentially what Day of the Dead began as, before the budget got slashed, leaving only Bub the Evolving Zombie in the final version. If you really want to see a stupid but even more direct production of Romero's original filmscript, you'll have to suffer through Return of the Living Dead 3 sometime. Bad though that was.

For everyone else, Land is the fourth Romero satire--not a parody of zombiefilms, but of people in general. This time, more than ever, it's hard to tell who the goodguys actually are. And not in a bad way. The three basic factions are the Haves, the Nots, and the Zombies, which ultimately break down into six or seven factions in a general fight for survival.

There are the zombies, since you can't really have a zombiefilm without them. Their faction fractures into a couple of groups, fairly early on in the film: the original, dumbassed monsters, and the more highly evolved problemsolvers led by Big Daddy the ExFillingStationAttendant. And that, while not precisely the point of the film, might be the most interesting aspect: that the smarter zombies can be startled by the dumber ones, and that they're willing to exterminate the lesser subspecies to gain control. That is to say that the uberzombies actually display frustration and lament, and have no time to bother with the morons from which they'd evolved. It's a nice, subtle parallel to the actions of the living, with their own caste systems.

Which brings us to roughly four other factions. The most obvious is led by Kaufman the ExMogul [somewhere in a rant about his reasons for being where is, he mentions that he'd used his own, presumably preexisting money to build the fences, train the armies, and commission the weaponry in use today] who's built a McCarthyist restricted neighbourhood into a skyscraper--the only thing in Pittsbugh's skyline with internal lighting--and positioned its board of directors to approve only upscaled white people into his paradise.

Employed by Kaufman is Cholo, oliveskinned and disallowed from joining the community, despite the dirtywork he performs for it: specifically hiding the bodies of those whose executions have been ordered by the elite. In reaction, he steals the Dead Reckoning: a mobile medlab retrofitted with stinger missiles and zerolux cameras, designed to protect soldiers from zombies in the field, but capable of destroying Kaufman's tower from a safe distance.

Kaufman, claiming that they don't negotiate with terrorists, refuses to meet Cholo's demands, instead hiring Riley--a rival mercenary--to hunt down the vehicle and return it, getting that to happen by, of all things, having Riley's car stolen. Riley and his team, joined by Kaufman's own mercenaries with their own agenda, head out to intercept the machine, Riley intending to steal it in place of his car and use it to reach Canada, which should have no people, dead or alive.

Somewhere between the competing mercenary groups are the general populace of the city, barred from the tower, but protected by Kaufman's electrified fences. Cholo's plan to destroy the tower will necessarily destroy the city itself.

Meanwhile, the zombies are crossing the river. Not by learning to swim, but by learning that it's possible to walk along its bed to the other side. It's at this point that the film almost becomes a Resident Evil game, but with the zombies themselves solving the puzzles.

In the basic process of getting from the beginning of the film to the end, in which the zombies will obviously get into the city and eat everyone in sight, there are a couple of unusual twists, including the infexion of Cholo, who, doomed anyway, decides to 'see how the other half lives', returning to the tower to confront Kaufman personally, if posthumously. Which is curious in its own way: I think we're meant to assume that someone bit by an evolved zombie will be evolved by default, suggesting that the zombiebug itself is really the object of the evolution. Which, of course, makes a bit more sense, since this film seems to be meant to take place within about five years after 1968's Night of the Living Dead; and that's a bit quick for compex mammals to evolve, with or without designer viral help.

The ending itself is also a twist. In the final seconds of the film, with Dead Reckoning's guns trained on Big Daddy, Riley spares the zombie's afterlife, deciding 'They're just looking for a place to go. Same as us.' As the armoured assault medlab drives off into the sunrise, we're left to assume that a truce has been called between the living and the dead, at least among various individuals. Whether that puts an end to nearly forty years' of Romero's zombiefilms is anyone's guess; I suppose that'll rely largely on the box office and DV sales, which have already reimbused the $15million budgetted to make the film.

In either case, this film ended nicely, and could serve to be the final episode. Day of the Dead's ending twenty years ago had worked for what it was, but, what it wasn't was an ending to the issue itself; it only wrapped up the fates of the living characters in the story. This time, the larger matter of zombies crawling the planet is handled.

What isn't handled--and no one at this point had expected it to be--was the Reason. In the earlier films, the zombies were blamed on everything from venusian probes irradiating the dead to hell filling up to nature striking back. This time, there wasn't even a hunch about that. This time, the existence of the zombies was just a fact of life with no rhyme or reason to be discovered. Asking why there were zombies held all the importance of asking why there were people. It was just the way things were.

One last thing: this was the first of Romero's zombiefilms to have a rating; letting the MPAA apply their strange and fluid critique was his half of the compromise to get a real budget. So there's significantly less gore in this film, which, oddly enough, improved it somewhat. Romero manoeuvred into a few convincing Hitchcock moments instead of focussing on 3M's upsetting CautionOrange blood, actually making this a darker, more suspenseful film. Though I suspect that the unrated version, which should be at Suncoast by the end of the year, will introduce the final seconds to a few precipitously cut scenebreaks. Hopefully, that version will remain more creepy and less silly than some of the ECUs on sinew seen hitherto.