Simon Pegg’s conflicted feelings on Zack Synder’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’
Sure enough, Simon Pegg has extended his talents across countless movies in a wide range of genres, but for those of us who were kicking about in the mid-2000s, we would always come to know the actor by his role in Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, the first part of the collective Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy.
The iconic romantic zombie comedy of 2004, also starring the likes of Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, and Bill Nighy, saw Pegg play the titular Shuan, a cynical London salesman who finds himself in the midst of a zombie apocalypse and is tasked with saving his loved ones.
Pegg had already worked with Frost and Wright on the latter’s television sitcom Spaced, and there was a moment in a particular episode in which his character hallucinates a zombie invasion that inspired Shaun of the Dead and gave the United Kingdom one of its most cherished comedy moments of the 21st century.
Naturally, Shaun of the Dead paid its respects to the great zombie horror movies of the past, and its title is, of course, a dedication to George A. Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, which followed on from the director’s 1968 effort Night of the Living Dead. In the very same year that Wright’s zombie movie was released, Zack Snyder put out his remake of Dawn of the Dead, which Pegg seemed to have mixed feelings about.
Speaking with Drafthouse, the actor said that he found positive things within Snyder’s action horror movie, written by James Gunn, but that the original was perhaps a better effort overall. “I liked it, but I think that it missed a lot of the point and poetry of the original,” Pegg said. “Until the very end, there aren’t actually many zombies in it.”
With an ensemble cast including Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber and Mekhi Phifer, as well as the original movie’s Scott Reiniger, Tom Savini and Ken Foree, taking on cameo roles, Snyder set about delivering his version of Dawn of the Dead, although there was adamance at the time that it would be a “re-envisioning” of the original rather than a director remake.
Zombie horror was rife in the mid-2000s, and alongside Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead, Snyder helped to reinvigorate the genre. Despite missing the “poetry” of Romero’s original, Pegg felt that Snyder managed to deliver a decent effort overall, noting, “It’s just this brilliant take on ingrained behaviours. One of the most telling moments of the film is when they steal the money from the bank – but as they leave the bank, they still walk out through the barriers.”
“They respect the old rituals, you know, and it’s brilliant in a million little ways like that,” the actor added, “telling us about how we are and to what extent we’re programmed into these insensible behaviours.” Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead saw a band of survivors trying to get through a zombie apocalypse while taking refuge in a suburban shopping mall.
Romero himself had particular distaste for the remake, but on a wider scale, the film was relatively well-received. Even though the nuances of Romero’s version seemed to be eschewed, particularly in the eyes of Simon Pegg, the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead still stands as a decent effort in the canon of 2000s zombie cinema.
