The story more or less takes the shape of an extended chase scene, in which the living and the zombies alternate between their roles as hunters and hunted. Riley, who's anxious to split for Canada (where the film was actually shot), to find a land without borders and zombies, works salvaging supplies from outside the city. Inside an armored vehicle ordained "Dead Reckoning," he and his crew, whose numbers include Cholo (an exceptionally good John Leguizamo), search the zombie-infested badlands for food and medical supplies. For Cholo and some of the others, there's much fun to be had popping wheelies on motorcycles while blowing holes through the zombies, even if the ghouls, still dressed in the clothes in which they died -- a cheerleader's outfit, a butcher's apron -- look uncomfortably human.
Neither fully alive nor dead, zombies exist between the margins, in a twilight state that makes them among the most unsettling of all man-made creatures. That's the essential paradox of all zombie movies, but it's a paradox that has taken on increasing complexity in Romero's zombie quartet. In Night of the Living Dead, the zombies were more or less indistinguishable rotting-meat puppets. Like animals, they were also beyond good and evil, eating simply because they were hungry. (And zombies, of course, are always hungry.) This first film centers on a cluster of people holed up in a farmhouse surrounded by the dead. The hero is a black man who tries to save everyone only to end up dead, shot by a posse that, as Romero makes clear in the devastating finale, is little more than a lynch mob.
With each of Romero's zombie movies, the walking dead have grown progressively more human while the living have slowly lost touch with their humanity. One thing that has always distinguished Romero's films, not only from the horror-genre pack but from so many action flicks, is that the director knows killing is killing. The chilling cackling of the posse at the end of Night of the Living Dead reverberates through the bombed-out landscapes in Land of the Dead from the start, as one zombie after another bites the dust. Romero can make you jump out of your seat with the best of them, but the greatest shock here may be the transformation of a black zombie into a righteous revolutionary leader.
With Revenge of the Sith and Batman Begins, Land of the Dead makes the third studio release of the summer season to present an allegory, either naked or not, of our contemporary political landscape. Whatever else you think about these films, whether you believe them to be sincere or cynical, authentic expressions of defiance or just empty posturing, it is rather remarkable that these so-called popcorn movies have gone where few US films dare to go.
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