Films 2000s
(2008) Diary of the Dead
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Diary of the Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Release: 2008
A fresh cast confronts the inexplicable resurrection of the dead while filming a student horror film in the woods outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. News on the Internet filters through to the production - the dead are waking up - and authorities are scrambling to explain it and quell an equally restless living populace.
Easier said than done. As the filmmakers and their professor traverse the space between mild disbelief and outright panic, evidence of the rapidly crumbling constructs that have propped up American society abound. The quest to find help becomes a quest to find refuge, any place safe from both the shuffling cannibal hordes and the gun-toting power mongers rushing to fill the vacuum a retreating government and law enforcement leave behind.
From the nuclear family of their production camper to the empty promise of a hospital; from the rural generosity of the Amish to the collapsing social balance of the city; from the corrupted solace of the suburban home to the tomb-like enclave of the gated community, Romero propels his cast through a series of vignettes that effectively describe and recap the major points of all four previous Dead films.
But "Diary of the Dead" is more overtly political than "Night of the Living Dead," or any of that film's successors. Romero's projection of the U.S. government onto the canvas of "Diary" approaches driven, and soaks the film in a kind of head-wound inducing deliberation. Romero is not paralleling post-9/11 and post-Hurricane Katrina America, here; he's thrusting it onto the set of "Diary of the Dead" in a way with which he only flirted before.
When the warehouse ensconced black men of Pittsburgh tell Creed they've finally "got the power," Romero's script is about storm-devastated New Orleans, not undead-plagued Pennsylvania.
When the news, flickering from laptops and satellite-fed flat screens aboard the camper, broadcast the evolving military response to the rising dead, "Diary" is about the distraction and redirection of the public following the World Trade Center attacks. The threat, according to Romero's story, is whatever it is the public is told threatens.
And "Diary of the Dead" is overtly about the media. Specifically, it is about the mainstream media and the Internet. This is the first zombie film about bloggers.
Joshua Close plays an almost entirely off-camera role as Jason Creed, the would-be documentarian who's suddenly a point man in the war for truth. Against the wishes of his girlfriend (Michelle Morgan as the tough and effective Debra Moynihan), Creed relentlessly films everything, everyone, every day. He uploads what he captures to the Web, and the denizens of the Internet begin to spread the footage of this ad hoc network of reporters. It doesn't save the world, but it begins to perforate the bubble of lies the traditional media disseminates.
The problem with "Diary of the Dead" is that in the service of this set of themes, Romero makes crummy aesthetic choices. Electing the handheld look seems a natural in Romero's world. It's an attractive concept, the cinema verite of the walking dead.
Unfortunately, rather than work the lens like Matt Reeves did with "Cloverfield," Romero adopts a kind of faux handheld, in which the camera is steady, the shots edited and supported by soundtrack, and the lighting atmospheric. A half-hearted framing story in which Debra tells the audience she's edited Creed's footage and added music for effect doesn't salvage the too-perfect in-film effect. "Diary of the Dead" looks confused, and shows its low-budget roots in a way Romero's previous indie zombie movies never suffered.
As it stands, it's a pretender to its own thrown. It's not realistic, but the characters act as if it were. The juxtaposition is more mannered than anything Romero did with the conventional directing of his four other entries. And less effective. Romero is a master of the shot and blocking, and he sacrifices most of that strong suit in "Diary of the Dead."
"Diary of the Dead" leaves audiences with plenty of ideas to chew on, but of the Dead films, it's the fast-food dinner.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Diary of the Dead, 2008
And "Diary of the Dead" is overtly about the media. Specifically, it is about the mainstream media and the Internet. This is the first zombie film about bloggers.
