Diary of the Dead

A review by Michael O'May

GEORGE ROMERO HATES YOU

I guess I can consider myself lucky. I was one of the few who actually got to see Diary of the Dead, George Romero’s new zombie movie. At first I thought they were just playing it safe and doing a limited release of the film before a larger DVD launch but it eventually crawled into my very remote neck of the woods and completely under the radar, but I was checking the paper for that just in case moment. It’s a shame that the movie pales in comparison to everything else Romero has ever done, even “Season of the Witch” and “There’s Always Vanilla”

Zombies used to scare me, a lot. But only when used right, zombies as a metaphor for the crumbling of society around us and the bleak world they bring with them just scares the fuck out of me but I love every second of it. There was only one man who was capable of delivering zombies the right way time in and time out consistently and that’s the man who created them, George Romero. That however has come to a screeching halt with Diary of the Dead.

I’m not sure what it is Romero had to say if anything at all with Diary. The longer I sit and think about it the more confused I become. There’s a message but it doesn’t make much sense.

The film utilizes the handheld style narrative to tell its reboot of the Romero universe. You get lots of handheld footage mixed with “youtube” clips mixed even more with news footage, which is pretty clearly Romero trying to get his finger on what makes our generation tick. The idea on paper sounded great to me, a way to make it more real to take the cartoon out of modern zombies by placing them into a new narrative structure, sadly it just falls apart rather quickly as Romero’s own writing quickly realizes how stupid it is to be filming a zombie apocalypse first person and not doing things like say surviving.

Let’s talk about the movie.

We get introduced to our protagonists (and I’m not sure that’s the word, MTV generation assholes may be better) while they film a student movie with the aid of their film professor in the middle of the Pennsylvanian woods. They are all white homogenized pretty kids that you almost immediately hate the minute they open their mouths, not once does a single one of them feel real beyond the horrible stereotypes they represent. I don’t know where Romero lost his love for real looking worn down 30 something actors that you can relate to but I for one miss them greatly. George takes the kids filming a mummy movie (yeah no idea why he went with mummies) to hammer in a point that clearly drives him nuts, the dead don’t run. The point later becomes redundant as Romero drops a few bad one liners to further get his point across. As soon as he’s done bitching about running zombies the kids find out that the dead are coming back to life and eating the living. From this point on the kid’s just bounce from one set piece to the next that increasingly make less and less sense. Logic takes a back seat as from what I’m guessing is George saying fuck it and trying to make a fun movie. The whole time the films main character can not stop filming anything, which works for us the viewer but your put into a semi real world by Romero so immediately it makes no sense and the characters know it too. Every other minute the characters are screaming at the man behind the camera saying “why the hell do you keep filming? You could have helped us when X pretty character was being bitten by a zombie”, it pisses the characters off and it will piss you off too.

You don’t get to know any of the characters which pretty much kills every ounce of drama the movie has. You don’t care either way if a character lives or dies because you have no investment in them. The only stand out exception comes in the form of a deaf Amish guy with pockets full of dynamite. The Amish guy -like the movie- makes little sense but comes off as very entertaining the 5 minutes he’s in the film.

The world of Diary and its characters fall apart very quickly. I’d imagine it would take at least a few days for things to get shitty, at least in the Romero sense of things, you know zombies shambling around everywhere, chaos, everything abandoned. In Diary it literally happens in a few hours. The kids hear that the zombie mess is starting and a minute later the shit has hit the fan everywhere. They go to a hospital and its completely abandoned spare the zombies roaming around everywhere, when the outbreak started a few hours ago. The kids are just starting to hear what’s going on and a character just decides to shoot herself, for no real reason beyond her apparent religious zeal. Zombies pop up in the middle of nowhere en mass in a matter of seconds. The whole thing is rushed for the sake of moving the story along but it does so at the sake of credibility.

The zombies are pretty half ass as well; there are no real hero zombies for us to ogle at and thank god for practical effects. Here we just get the freshly and pretty boring dead, some times they have weird appliances in their mouths to give their lips an odd shape but that’s about it. Really another misstep by Romero that I wish he would have stuck with, after all the zombies are the main attraction.

The actual movie itself is only an hour or so long with narration by the editor to bridge scenes and stretch the run time. The first time it’s poignant and it serves the purpose of giving us a little commentary for the pretty chaotic film, but the second, third, fourth, and fifth times are just pointless and have nothing to say.

Nothing to say….

It has taken me rambling about this movie to maybe find its deepest meaning, it’s plain and simple laid right out for us all to see, and it’s nothing. The film while on its surface is a pretty bad movie and a pale comparison to Romero’s other work. The surface message is Romero shaking his fist at the youth of American hating what our “Youtube generation” has done to the film medium. And he’s right in that regard, everyone being a filmmaker has done more to lower the bar and hurt the art form he loves so much than it has to help it.

But if you dig just a little deeper you can see another message, and I’m not entirely sure it’s what he really had to say, but we, my generation, the 20 something’s of the world have nothing to say. We have been hit so hard with the mass media shovel that there is no more voice, we are all just cookie cutter idiots that think we have some sort of greater truth to show the world via Youtube but really we don’t. I think that’s what George A Romero is trying to say via zombies this time- You guys suck.