There's no clearer evidence of a director's career output having had its problems than finding that a horror movie remake is his best work. 2004's Dawn of the Dead is without question the film which shows Snyder's fingerprints the least, and sets its sights the lowest; and yet, this is arguably what makes it work, even for admirers of George A Romero's 1979 original. Though it may be the least recognisably Synder-ish of Snyder's films, Dawn of the Dead did in many respects set the course for his career inasmuch as it took an already revered piece of work, then proceeded to make it bigger, louder, and most notoriously faster; the slow, shuffling zombies of old are replaced with athletic, uber-aggressive models in the vein of the rage-infected antagonists of 28 Days Later. This proved controversial, yet irrefutably influential, with many zombie movies that followed (and there were a great many made in the 2000s) opting for fast zombies. By contrast with many of the horror remakes of the 2000s (and there were a great many of those as well), Snyder's Dawn of the Dead manages to take the core concept of the original and successfully take it in a somewhat different direction. Gone is Romero's dystopian nightmare of a world losing all identity through commerical homogenisation, to be replaced by a more optimistic vision of a diverse cross-section of society overcoming their differences and learning to work together for the common good. In this respect the film is more pointedly the handiwork of writer James Gunn, who has explored similar ideas in his other films (though it should be noted Scott Frank and Michael Tolkin did uncredited work on the script). Ultimately, the key reason the Dawn of the Dead remake holds up is the sense that Snyder is keeping it simple. Perhaps a return to a smaller scale is just what the director now needs in order to bring him back down to earth - because the way things are going right now, Snyder's in real danger of losing his head in the clouds completely.
