The Crazies (2010)

The 2010 edition of The Crazies arrives with a modest inheritance: George A. Romero's 1973 original, a new director in Breck Eisner, and a mandate to be leaner than its predecessor. It is a competent, well-shot outbreak thriller set in the fictional Ogden Marsh, Iowa, where a crashed cargo plane leaks a biological weapon into the water supply and the townspeople turn violent. Timothy Olyphant plays the sheriff with the weariness of a man who has read the script. Radha Mitchell is his wife, the town doctor, and she is allowed to be capable and pregnant at the same time. This is progress of a sort, though the film makes no argument about it.

On the matter of social consciousness, the record is thin. The cast is standard for its era: a female lead, a couple of supporting women, and no particular interest in who fills the remaining slots. There is no engagement with race, no LGBTQ presence, no environmental subtext, and no affirmative treatment of mental difference. The infected are grotesque, and their madness is a horror device, not a condition to be understood. The film's only political register is paranoia about the military and the government, an anti-authority reflex that predates any class-conscious reading. When the soldiers begin shooting civilians, the film is doing what outbreak narratives have always done, not making a point about capital.

The craft is the point. The makeup, designed from medical references for rabies and tetanus, gives the infected a bursting, hyper-alive quality, and the film moves with the efficiency of something that knows better than to stop and explain itself. It is a survival machine, tense and unpretentious, and it never once lectures. In a genre increasingly given to sermons, that restraint is the most radical thing about it. It will not change anyone's politics. It was not trying to.