Hollywood finally did it. After churning out terrible remakes of seemingly every noteworthy horror movie from the 70s and 80s, Breck Eisner’s “The Crazies” is a worthy update of George Romero’s 1973 film. The pace, budget and gore have been amplified, and the anti-government message rampant in the original is, while toned down, still present. Better yet, the film seems fully conscious that it’s not from the Vietnam generation, but rather one colored by news footage from Afghanistan and Iraq. People are displaced, homes are destroyed and the military sent to save the town of Ogden Marsh is silent and savage. Plot-wise, “The Crazies” has its missteps to be sure, but one can forgive most of the B-movie cliches because there is still enough to chew on.

The setting is established with a montage of the typical goings-on in a small, Iowa farming town set to Johnny Cash’s cover of “We Will Meet Again” (probably a deliberate riff on the ending of “Dr. Strangelove”). We are quickly introduced to the four main characters, who rarely diverge from the standard stock qualities: the gruff hero Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Oliphant), his pregnant, doctor wife, Judy, his buddy and deputy, Russell, and Becca, Judy’s teenage assistant–who somehow becomes a main character. Some townspeople start to become eerily vacant, and a few break out into psychopathic violence.

Dutton and co. basically figure out what’s going on, but their intuitions are predictably unheeded. Then the dam breaks: the virus responsible spreads rapidly, and the government begins its “containment protocol.” The military appears, adorned in gas masks and body armor, attempting to quarantine all who are possibly infected and evacuating the others. This leaves our main four trying to escape from the town filled with super-violent friends and overrun with soldiers who will shoot anything that moves.

Although many people involved in production clearly wanted this to be a zombie movie, these creatures aren’t exactly the same. Here the infected retain their sense of identity and sometimes the ability to speak, and they do not want to eat the living. They just want to kill everything. Not only does this lead to some great exploitative images, but it also adds another aspect to the paranoia. We can’t just have the standard, badass trigger-happy zombie slaughterers, since any zeal shown in killing anyone could be a sign of infection or, more interestingly, actual craziness.

The military’s actions present another layer to the insanity of the crisis. Convinced that the safest course of action would be to complete their containment procedure without explaining anything to the civilians, the men with guns separating families for no discernible reason understandably sets off some resistance from the residents of Ogden Marsh. After their first attempt at handling those who could be infected completely breaks down, they adopt a less nuanced “kill and burn” strategy. In many ways, this is the mirror image of the devastation caused when the United States has tried to protect foreign countries and itself against fanaticism, utterly destroying the homes of many ideologically uninvolved families. Romero’s film may be angrier at the numb bureaucracy that can perpetrate such horror, but Eisner’s is more sympathetic to the plight of those caught in the crossfire.

The biggest problem with “The Crazies” is that there is so much potential symbolism and allegory that Eisner can’t quite handle it all satisfyingly. Some themes are brought up only briefly, left behind as we plod through a number of admittedly interesting set pieces that are ultimately just spectacle. It clearly isn’t a passion project with a definite message, but rather a studio movie that was handled as well as could be expected. It’s a thinking man’s schlock picture that may not quite hit the mark, but it aims for something deep. And in some scenes, it does in fact prick the nerve.