 Originally Posted by MinionZombie
I'll indulge you this one time, JDP.
1) There are many reasons for the look of the zombies changing or not changing. One is the ability of practical effects, another is the available budget. Comparing Land of the Dead to The Walking Dead shows major leaps and bounds in terms of what can be achieved with zombies, but also in how they cast the zombie roles as on TWD they regularly cast quite thin people to show the decay off more (it also allows them to build upon the actor without the zombie appearing too 'bulky').
In Land of the Dead the principal cast of zombies were all your normal, every day actors - so they'll be of a normal, healthy, human build.
Can't think of one very decayed looking zombie in Land of the Dead?
As for the decay of the cities. We only saw one city in Day, and the damage there was cosmetic (for obvious reasons - lack of budget, no easy use of CGI). Apocalyptic, no doubt, but it was mostly detritus on the streets, some newspapers blowing around, a few smashed up cars and such. Land of the Dead, on the other hand, shows far more of the world around it in various states (including long, overgrowing plants - passage of time).
2) All we know is the situation of the people in the bunker inside Day. We get very little information about what's going on in the outside world. The people they were talking to might have gone AWOL, or the link broke down (McDermott's radio is woefully out of date, remember, and barely functioning). Day is mankind scattered to the wind, the dazed chaos of a species that has been knocked for six - Land is the coming together afterwards. It simply is not in mankind's nature to just drift off into nothingness after getting battered.
3) They re-established communications with communities they re-established. Kaufman explains himself that he paid for the setting up of these communities (which makes it clear that he was doing something after the fall of mankind, to rejuvenate the species' hold on the planet and not let it fall to the zombies forever). They took back sections of the world, built new defences, and gathered people back together again and reorganised them. That's one of the major points/themes that Land is working with - reflected in the zombies themselves, whose evolution in understanding is absolutely, positively, clearly AFTER the events of Day of the Dead and Bub. Bub goes from average-ish zombie to recognising Rhodes' rank and seeking revenge for the death of Logan. In Land we see Big Daddy go from lone wolf aware of what's happening to a leader of an entire army, putting guns in the hands of fellow zombies and teaching them (albeit crudely) how to fire them, he even instructs certain zombies (the Butcher) to perform tasks when their progress is hindered. Bub was never at that level - the evolution of the zombies alone screams loud and proud that Land takes place after Day. Romero spoke about it repeatedly himself, of Land's zombies being an evolution of those from Day. Evolution doesn't go backwards in time.
4) *sigh* Again, this has been discussed to death, but the basics of it is thus: mankind understands the value of money and the cash-for-services system. It was a system that mankind had grown up on, and it would have only been 'put aside by the apocalypse' for what, a couple of years? They've got enough to deal with, establishing an entirely brand new economic system isn't going to be a priority. Also, if you didn't have that, you'd bugger up the entire plotline of Kaufman being the rich man in the ivory tower - he's using old world power and influence in the apocalypse to re-establish mankind as it once was. Money still has power, and is a simple system that is already understood by every single human being in that (and other) settlements. The thread dedicated to the subject went over it in far more detail - but suffice it to say, money in Land absolutely makes sense.
5) By the time we come to Land the people have got used to the zombies - again, this was one of Romero's clearly stated objectives with the film as far back as the original script he wrote in the 1990s. It was about 'stepping over the problem and ignoring it', so therefore it stands to reason that the humans would be pretty capable of dealing with the zombies. However, even still, people get bitten, but for the most part we see people venturing out in organised groups (see points 2 and 3) with military vehicles, distraction techniques, body armour, and weapons galore. They've discovered ways to keep the zombies occupied (the "sky flowers") so they meet little resistance as they scavenge.
In Day of the Dead you've got a handful of people with no organised pool of vehicles, weapons, armour, and certainly not the amount of people that they had scrounged together from the streets of Fiddler's Green to do the job. You've got a pilot, a radio man, a scientist, and one (collapsing) military guy. They're not a strong unit for venturing into the world.
6) They've chosen a tactical location - what is almost an island (surrounded by rivers with the bridges up) - and the one strip of land is heavily guarded and defended. They explicitly state that the zombies got wise to the electric fences and opted to sod off elsewhere. In Day of the Dead, the particular group we follow, have been dumped into an old missile silo at a moment's notice (Sarah states that the whole operation was hastily put together - in the heat of the initial outbreak - they went there a few weeks in and have been stuck there for months). Land shows mankind getting themselves re-organised after the events of Day, which shows how mankind scurried to the nearest defendable safe place in a panic. Land shows mankind has taken a breather, got themselves together, and striking out into the world again. Simples.
1- The average zombies in Day look more decayed than those of Land. Even their clothes look more worn down. All this suggests they have been around gradually decaying for a longer time.
We see one large city in Day as an example of how things are looking by this time into the zombie crisis: it looks quite messy and abandoned, with garbage, debris, rotted corpses, rusting cars, wild animals have moved in... Now compare that to the "neater" look of both abandoned cities & towns we see as samples in Land.
2- We can easily deduce quite more from what the people in the bunker say. These people have only been isolated from other parts of the US for some relative amount of time. We know they used to "talk to Washington all the time". It is very safe to assume that they were not exchanging "recipes" during their frequent talks with their bosses in Washington, but precisely about things that matter for the zombie crisis, like what the hell is going on up there and elsewhere. These people in the bunker do not show any signs whatsoever that the information they have gotten from their bosses in Washington looks any "good" at all. The fact that even the government itself has apparently vanished is an even worse sign that things "up there" are no better than "down there" where they are. This is all very different from what see in Land, where there still are some large pockets of survivors thriving "up there" right on Washington's next door.
3- People like Kaufman were doing such things from very early on during the zombie crisis, the movie itself informs us that these outposts are not some development of the distant future.
We don't know when some zombies started getting "smart". What we see in Land is just one zombie displaying the Bub-like behavior of showing some degree of intelligence that we saw in Day. All the other zombies we see are just as "dumb" as the ones we see in the other Romero movies, who are capable of "mimicking" some things they see or vaguely remember from their past lives and of using simple tools, but little else (this was already established in Dawn.) The only reason they "learn" to do some basic things is because Big Daddy shows them how, and then they just blindly "follow the leader". Where is this supposed "evolution" of most zombies? It seems like it is just one in a whole bunch that occasionally "get smart". Same situation we saw in Day.
4- *Sigh* For money to have value there must be something backing it up. Whatever is it that is still backing up the US dollar in Land (perhaps the still lingering US government), it is certainly gone by the time of Day, where money lays on the streets like just another example of garbage. Money still had value in Dawn, though. Even as far as the crisis had already advanced by the time the biker gang assaults the mall (when there no longer are any government broadcasts anymore), evidently money was still a sought-for thing (the bikers waste no time looting the bank, so obviously even this far into the zombie crisis money still "talked" out there. This is certainly gone by the time of the much more decayed world of Day.)
5- Some people in Land are in fact still so unfamiliar with the zombies that one of them even has to ask for information regarding how long does it take for a bitten person to die and become a zombie (and the answer given is yet another huge contradiction to Romero's previous movies, but that is another "nitpick".) You don't see this by the time of Day, though, where everyone is well aware of this situation. There pretty much can be no human left on Earth who isn't very familiar with the zombies and what happens when you get bitten by one by the time of Day. But such ignorance of what exactly happens to a bitten person is still seen in Dawn, though (once again suggesting that what happens in Land should in fact be closer to what happens in Dawn than to what happens in Day.)
No vehicles in Day? Huge sections of the bunker are in fact FILLED with vehicles. Plus we know that at some point during their stay in the bunker they actually ventured outside to capture zombies (the zombies trapped in the section of the caves where the missile silo is were in fact put there on purpose, zombies captured on the outside by the soldiers and then brought down.) Judging by the amount of zombies they captured, it is very safe to assume that they likely used some of the vehicles down there to load and transport zombies to the caves. By the time we are allowed to see what's happening in Day, this is no longer an option. The soldiers now pretty much refuse to go outside anymore (that's why Sarah is against wasting any more specimens, since once they are gone the soldiers will likely not want to risk their lives going outside to capture more.) Things obviously have gotten worse since. More and more zombies everywhere.
6- Again, Kaufman et al. did all this early during the zombie crisis. This is not some development of the distant future.
We don't have any specific time reference in Day. All we know is that the operation they are currently involved in was put together in a rush (Sarah is referring to the start of the operation.) We don't know what they were doing before, and we don't know how long they have been down there since the operation started either.
The people in the bunker in Day could technically leave whenever they wanted to. They had a helicopter and land vehicles (but notice that the soldiers do not consider them an option, they want the helicopter; that should tell you something about how dangerous they consider land-travel at this point, unlike the world of Land, where land-travel in pretty much any kind of vehicle is still very much an option), yet the problem of where to go to is always present. With the only exception of the scientists (who do show a genuine interest in trying to solve the problem), these people are not staying down there because they want to, but pretty much because they have little other choice left (the only other option left, as is suggested by the pilot, is to go to an isolated island. Notice that there is no such thing as these "outposts" of Land to be considered as options in Day. It's either a bunker or an island, take your pick!)
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