The Dead (Spoiler Alerts if you care)

Alright, so here's my review of The Dead and this will contain some spoilers throughout if you care about such things but nothing major.

The opening scene starts with the main character, this aircraft engineer in the U.S. military, wandering through a hot desert day in a black burka and an AK-47 slung on his shoulder. He comes upon a random zombie, walks around it so as not to waste any ammo, then proceeds on to another zombie dressed in African military garb and shoots that one in the head. The camera pans in on this zombie signifying some sort of significance with this one. You then proceed to the next scene and within 15-20 minutes learn that it is going to be, spoiler alert, the African soldier dressed in the military garb, alone searching his village for survivors.

Giving that part away almost immediately isn't the worst this movie does. I will say what I liked about the beginning was the fact that there was little to no dialogue and there are a couple reasons for this. It was mostly just the main character trying to cope with the fact that he is now stranded in Africa, and he hast to try to survive. Just he and these, I have to say, pretty awesome looking African zombies roaming the region. The fact that there are so many zombies and it's so widespread throughout the area he travels is pretty awesome as well. He eventually stumbles upon this beaten up truck, which becomes a kind of character within the story itself, and of course gets it in working order. The truck really works to benefit the suspense throughout the movie.

It is, however, when the main character finally picks up this other African soldier and they begin to have dialogue that the movie takes another dip. I don't know where they found this guy, but his acting is atrocious. His performance was wholly unbelievable and kept me yearning for a replacement throughout the movie. He didn't come off as much of a military man whatsoever. In fact, he comes off as a freakin' wimp with a pistol who falls to the ground in terror every time a zombie gets near him. There is a scene towards the end of the movie where they try to make him out as some badass as well, and I wasn't buying it. More discussion on that in a bit.

The plot itself was sub-par. The African soldier is trying to get back to his son in a northern camp, and the main character is just trying to get out of the country. Granted, zombie movies are all about surviving, but there wasn't one moment in this movie I felt that the two main characters couldn't have easily escaped, even if only by foot. The zombies move extremely slow, and I accentuate EXTREMELY. If it weren't for the fact that the main characters were trying to constantly keep the truck alive in order to travel faster and farther than if by foot, there would have been no intense moments. It's only because of the truck that the engineer is so busy trying to always fix that they come upon any real close encounters with some flesh eaters.

Flesh eaters is a great nickname for the zombies in this movie. I actually rather liked the zombies. For one, as I stated before, there were so damn many of them. No matter where they traveled, even some of the remotest parts, they were stumbling upon a flesh eater. I say flesh eater since that's exactly what they were going for, just flesh. Whereas in some movies and even The Walking Dead you see the zombies trying to rip into organs and such, in this movie you see a zombie just take a bite of a leg, arm, or neck, rip off a piece and pause to chew it. They're just a bunch of hungry dead dudes. I can't think of any other zombie movies I've seen where the zombies just pause after a bite in order to chew the piece of flesh they've just bitten off. Most zombies are shown to continuously eat without reprieve.

Finally, setting aside the fact that this is a zombie movie, all other things being portrayed as realistic, it was a joke. Towards the end of the movie we come upon the scene again where the main character shoots in the head the African soldier-turned-zombie he partnered with throughout the movie, and we see everything come full circle. This really bothered me because he left this guy way across the desert previously when he unofficially died sitting at a tree. Unless I'm totally wrong about this zombie being his soldier buddy from before, there is NO way he walked as slow as all the other zombies all the way across the desert, especially before the main character reached the other side. Unreal. The last scene of the movie, and one that again really bothered me up until the last few minutes, they portray the main character as a Chuck Norris type in a black burka with a machete in one hand and an AK-47 in the other. There is a huge horde of zombies pounding against the north camp compound's wall, and the whole wall is just lined all the way along it with zombies. The main character just moseys up to one section of the wall, hacks off heads and limbs of zombies from just that section of wall, climbs on a stack of the dead zombie bodies to get over the wall, and then you see the camera pan back tot he wall with gobs of zombies still pounding on it. You mean to tell me that this guy wasn't bothered by ANY other zombies along that wall besides just that section? Freakin' A.

One of the only other things this movie actually does have going for it is the really gorgeous scenery. It looks great on blu, and the shots over the vast landscapes of Africa are really beautiful.

This brings my rating of the movie to an ultimate 2.5/4. I gave it a 2/4 a little prematurely on Twitter last night and want to bump my rating up another half star after sitting on it, but it definitely doesn't deserve any higher than a 2.5.