7. Shaun - Shaun of the Dead
Shaun of the Dead, which stars Simon Pegg as the eponymous title character, takes place in a suburb of London during a rather inconveniently-timed zombie apocalypse. Shaun works in a low-grade electronics store by day, and argues with his relatively understanding girlfriend Liz by night. She dumps him a day before hordes of the undead overtake his neighbourhood, and Shaun - alongside best friend/super slacker Ed - goes on a mission to rescue her. In the process, they pick up a ragtag group of friends and family, and Shaun leads them to their local pub, the Winchester, where he believes they will be safe from the zombie haul. Not so. The pub proves itself to be a relatively weak base of defense, and everybody but Shaun and Liz are either ripped apart by the undead, bitten, or dragged out into the night and never heard from again. But at least Shaun
tried, huh? He did his
best, right? Well, no, actually. Because when you think about it for longer than a few seconds, you realise that
Shaun of the Dead might've been more accurately titled:
Shaun Removes His Friends & Family From Safety And Gets Them All Killed, because that's exactly what happens. Think about it. Shaun drives about London, gets into people's homes, and forces them to follow him to the Winchester. They're either bitten on route, or are killed when they get there. Thing is, the Winchester is far more exposed than any of the places that Shaun's crew were hiding in before they joined him on his misadventure. Liz, locked in with her friends Dianne and David, was perfectly safe within the confines of her London flat. The zombies weren't exactly trying to get through the door into that place, and they likely would've struggled getting up the stairs anyway. Shaun's mother, Barbara, and her boyfriend Phillip, also fall victim to Shaun's ill-planning, though one could argue that Barbara would have been doomed either way, since Phillip had been bitten previously. Point is, even Barbara finds herself attacked and bitten by a zombie on the way to the Winchester. Who's to say she wouldn't have been better off back at home, where she could have tried fighting zombie Phillip with a rolling pin? Shaun's heart was in the right place, but his plan was mostly terrible. If that was the point, he's still a hero that you go along with blindly until you actually think about what occurred If the guy had just stayed indoors and barricaded himself in, nearly every member of his gang would've likely survived the zombie apocalypse. As a result of his forced heroics, everybody died (except Dianne, who is revealed to have made it through in the DVD extras - woo!).