Land of the Dead (2005)

George Romero returned to his living dead saga in 2005 with a larger budget and a freshly sharpened grievance. The survivors of the plague have walled themselves into downtown Pittsburgh, a feudal arrangement where the wealthy idle in a glass tower called Fiddler's Green and everyone else subsists in the slums below. Dennis Hopper plays Kaufman, a plutocrat who owns the commerce, the militia, and the armored vehicle that keeps the food arriving. The arrangement is not subtle. It was never meant to be.

Romero's target is money and the people who hoard it. Kaufman denies a loyal enforcer an apartment and earns a missile for his trouble. The poor are disposable labor, and the rich watch the carnage from a balcony with a drink in hand. Critics at the time read the film as a mirror held up to a post-9/11 America, and the fireworks used to distract the undead do carry a whiff of shock and awe. The sermon is unmistakable, though Romero stages it as a siege instead of a speech. The rich get eaten. The audience gets the point.

The cast is more varied than the genre usually bothered with in 2005, though the film never pauses to announce it. Asia Argento's Slack fights and survives, yet she remains largely defined by her rescue and her past. Eugene Clark's Big Daddy, a zombie who learns to lead an uprising, carries a quiet charge the script never examines. The result is a film with a conscience and a taste for viscera, arguing class war while the guts hit the floor. It is a blunt instrument, and it swings where it likes.