I have to tell you, I am a big fan of George Romero, so much so that I own virtually every movie he ever made. It all started with Night of the Living Dead, and the rest is history. This isn't to say I love everything that has come from the Romero camp; I haven't. The one I thought had potential, but was a huge letdown, was the original 1973 version of The Crazies. While there were certainly shocking moments in the original, for me, it fell short.

It was some time ago when I saw the original trailers for the remake of The Crazies. I was disappointed when I found out Romero wasn't going to be directing it, but the faithfulness to the original looked promising. With the direction of Breck Eisner, and his commitment to Romero, I was hopeful.

The Crazies has a unique plot that takes place in the little town of Ogden Marsh, Iowa. This small, quaint town loves coming out to watch a community baseball game, and everyone knows everyone else. The sheriff is a young man who has grown up there and has a deep passion for this town. After the crash of a military plane carrying waste from a government experiment, a virus impacts the town and the normal, good, God-loving people of Ogden Marsh take on violent attributes. While resembling the Romero zombies from movies of the past, there is enough of a difference here that keeps me from categorizing the afflicted as such.

The Crazies is more contemporary than the original. One of the things I appreciated is some of the detail in the story missing in the original. We see a credible job of acting, but the primary difference is the story. While some of the horror of the original (like a relationship between a father and daughter with sexual overtones) are left out, there is enough horror that has the viewer thinking. Virtually everything from the cinematography to the editing is better than the original. There are things that have this version working, like the examination as to who the real crazies are. One of the things I think Eisner does a better job of than Romero in the original is the questioning of the government and the power they have. We question not only their power, but their purpose in the execution of that power.

It is almost as if Eisner is presenting an Anabaptist point of view. Anabaptist is a religious belief system started by Menno Simmons and others that promote a concept many have heard of known as The Separation of Church and State. In this belief is the ideal that the state, or government, is inherently evil and does not always react to the best interest of the people that it supposedly represents. Eisner and the story of Romero certainly raise this question: does the state, does the government really care about the population it supposedly serves? Ultimately, we see a battle of good and evil, a battle where the good people of Ogden Marsh are impacted by the evil around them. It ignores much of the religious belief that all things always work out, and looks at the reality that it rains on the just and the unjust, and sometimes good people pay the consequences and price of the actions of others.

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