"When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth."
What I love so much about George Romero's original "Dead" trilogy (NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, DAWN OF THE DEAD, DAY OF THE DEAD) is that each one is my favorite from moment to moment. But I'm still pretty confident that DAWN is one of the best movies ever made, regardless of genre. Sure, the zombies look slathered in dollar store grease paint, but the film itself is SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE in the zombie apocalypse.
It is about the slow decay of relationships in an unbelievable situation, which *feels* believable because it is depicted so normally. There's a great contradiction at the center, where the characters both adapt to their new situation with shocking ease, and absolutely don't adapt to it at all, because they're steeling up on the outside and shattering within. NIGHT is about people collapsing in an immediate crisis, DAY is about learning (or not) to accept the world as it has become, and DAWN is this utterly fascinating, meaty, 2 hour character study about manufacturing peace in an apocalypse. You can't shut yourself off from what's happening and try to live like normal when the dead are just outside the door, clawing to get in, when you've experienced a trauma that's fundamentally affected you even if you try to ignore it.
Stephen (AKA Flyboy) is perhaps the best example we've ever seen of what would realistically be one of the most common types of guy in this scenario: a person who wants to be the hero, someone who tries to assert themselves as a leader, but completely lacks the capabilities to do it. He is not an everyman who is in over his head but manages to rise to the occasion. He can't shoot. He never gets very good at it. He gets shot while cowering in a corner and hoping he won't be spotted.
Other characters begin to lose their grip over time, but Stephen is immediately emasculated and embarrassed by the fact that his buddies (who are trained SWAT guys) can shoot, and he, the helicopter pilot for a local news station, cannot. In another movie, a character with those traits would become antagonistic, would even become a full-fledged villain, but DAWN OF THE DEAD is so beyond that. He's one of our heroes, and these are his faults, and that's that. The film is more interesting than simply presenting him as an antagonist. It uses one of our leads to show a guy who is realistically not cut out for this world. He's just not that guy and that feels so authentic.
And then there's the classic theme of consumerism. The dead flock to the mall because some part of them remembers they "need" to be there, but our survivors do the same, and are just as tricked by the promise that this place will have everything they need. But surrounding themselves with material things can't fix two people falling out of love, or another snapping under the pressure and the horror, or the wolves at the gate, both living and dead.