Diary of the Dead

Title: Diary of the Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Cast: Michelle Morgan, Scott Wentworth, Joshua Close
Year: 2007
MPAA: Rated R for strong horror violence and gore, and pervasive language.
Date of Review: March 14, 2007

First it was racism. Then consumerism. A few years later it was the military. Twenty years after that it was the greedy businessmen who run the world. Now the “living dead” return, and the new target in their socially conscious sights is us – that is to say, those of us who thrive on the new direction the media has taken with the advent of the internet. Some have called us “Generation Y”, and it’s becoming more apparent every time a new viral video makes waves the world over that the “Y” stands for “YouTube”. George Romero has focused his ever-critical eye on this new trend of recording everything we see, sharing even the most personal experiences with complete strangers on the web, often in an effort to achieve as high a number of “hits” as possible.

It’s obvious from seeing Diary of the Dead that Romero is at least a little bit disturbed by what these recent trends could be leading to. It’s not just the creepy voyeurism that this is both bringing out and nurturing in people, but it’s also the fact that people frequently put themselves in harm’s way just to get some good footage. Look at Jackass, and all the countless copy-cats it has spawned. Watching people get hurt has become a genre of film unto itself, so why not take that to the next level? Why not have people being brutally killed and eaten by armies of reanimated corpses?

In typical Romero fashion, this latest entry into the popular zombie series shows a small group of people as they try to survive amidst the beginning of a zombie outbreak. This is the third entry in Romero’s five-film series which shows the beginning of this cataclysmic event, and Diary of the Dead attempts to make it more personal than ever, as it is filmed using hand-held cameras, from the first-person perspective of some college-age filmmakers who become obsessed with chronicling the decline of society during this horrifying time. Romero tries to add realism to a situation which is decidedly unreal, and at points he succeeds – the film has some downright scary moments. In fact, it’s the first time I’ve been scared by zombies in quite a while, since they’ve become so commonplace in popular film and culture.

Knowing Romero’s track record, maybe it’s a little much to expect “good” dialogue – he has never written anything which was less than heavy-handed, and given the fact that he’s been making films that way for over 40 years now, that must be exactly what he wants. But it’s hard to forgive Diary of the Dead’s stilted, unnatural writing when it’s supposed to be like a reality-TV version of a zombie movie. If these are supposed to be real people, why do they talk to each other so awkwardly? Why are there still such clichéd characters, like the old, jaded intellectual who spouts out obscure literary references at the drop of a hat, and the nerd who knows all there is to know about technology and computers but couldn’t socialize to save his life? These generalized characters may work in the context of Romero’s other - more cinematic - films, but here it only serves to remove the viewer from the events of the film. There is some really terrible dialogue here, which often borders on unintentional comedy. At one point in the film, one of the young filmmakers relates the zombie attacks to humanity’s constant state of war, by saying “it used to be us versus us. Now it’s us versus them…only they, are us.” It sounds like something one would read in a high school philosophy paper, and is a reflection of how the film never reaches past a superficial depth.

The comparisons to Cloverfield are inevitable, since both films take fantastic situations and put the viewers in the shoes of those directly affected by the events. But for all its flaws, Cloverfield used this documentary style much more effectively, since (as I reflect on it more) it had no pretenses about giving the audience a “message” - a giant monster attacks New York City, and a group of people struggle to survive the chaos. By writing dialogue with relevance and commentary, Romero shot himself in the foot and betrayed his original concept of giving that “ground level” look at events.

However, these problems do not totally destroy Diary of the Dead. It’s greatly superior to Land of the Dead, which just got too big with its scope and character roster. Romero obviously works more effectively with a smaller cast and overall size of film, and by the end of Diary of the Dead we can see that he’s still the master of close-quarters combat with the living dead; there are two sequences involving the characters trying to barricade themselves indoors and away from the zombie hordes, and these are the closest Romero has come so far to recreating the tension which was so prevalent in Night of the Living Dead.

Diary of the Dead is better than most of the zombie fare to come out lately, especially since 99% of it is straight-to-video. It’s not a horror masterpiece (and I’m still eagerly awaiting Romero’s one last shining moment before retirement) but it briefly re-instilled my fear of zombies taking over the world, so that must count for something.

6 / 10