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Foree delivers, once again, the most famous line from the original film, "when there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth", but all other dialogue from the original screenplay seems to have been left by the wayside. The plot in the remade film is non-existent, and is really just an afterthought to the action. Romero used situations to further develop the ideas that he had seeded in his earlier film, but Snyder's vision of Dawn of the Dead foregoes any plot development because the film is a standalone piece, as opposed to Romero's series of films based on the zombie concept. Even the setting itself is supplanted by Snyder to fit his own personal background. Where Romero is a native of Pittsburgh, and sets all of his films there, Snyder is a native of Madison Wisconsin, and his version takes place closer to his hometown, just a few hundred miles away in Milwaukee. This does not necessarily change the innate qualities of the film, but it is another noticeable deviation from the original movie.

Visually the films are radically different, but this is due solely to the 25-year gap in between the times in which they were made. The MTV-esque visual style of the new film is a far cry from the original's conservative medium shot and long lens feel. While neither one of these techniques is technically wrong per se, the feel of Snyder's movie is much more akin to an action picture than it is to Romero's horror film style. The makeup effects used in the films might be the only visual similarity, maybe the only similarity at all, between the two of them. Although the technology available today via computers would have allowed makeup director David LeRoy Anderson and his team to digitally animate the zombies in the new film, they admirably chose to go the old fashioned route. Much like Tom Savini's zombies in the original Dawn of the Dead, Anderson's ghouls are a worthwhile labor of love for makeup aficionados who flock to these types of films.

Since the films are so different in nearly every regard, largely due to the span of time between the two, it is almost unfair to directly compare them. George Romero's Dawn of the Dead was a storytelling masterpiece of the genre, and has been viewed as such for the past 27 years. Zack Snyder's remade exegesis was nothing more than a broken down vehicle, commissioned by Universal, to cash in on an already established property. Both films have their merits, and certainly the directors and crews of both pictures worked hard to bring the best product possible to the screen, but the limitations of working within a studio environment are apparent in Snyder's version. It's possible that Snyder's intentions were commendable from the start, but the constraints of working under someone else's thumb undoubtedly hampered his ability to produce a praiseworthy credit to George Romero's original concept. Rather than liberally "remaking" the original film, 2004's version of Dawn of the Dead should have simply been renamed and released as a semi-original movie, thus not alienating the already established fan-base of the original. Both films have individual merits, but they are not traits that they share in common. Cutting ties would certainly have been a benefit to both films, and served to steer clear of unfair critiques heaped on Snyder's vision as an artist.

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