Diary Of The Dead

Dir: George Romero
95 Min
2008









A group of film students are working on a film when they start hearing reports that the dead are coming back to life. Taking the camera with them they decide to document their survival in flight as the dead walk the earth. We learn at the beginning of the film that the footage the film students shot has been preserved and edited into a film by one of the survivors.

Romero here is using the same approach to his subject matter as the recent Cloverfield (2008) did. In what almost seems a homage he borrows a very similar structure to that used in Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Where the latter film cleverly used the contrast between screening room and documentary footage to implicate the audience in the screen violence though Romero instead uses the device to decry the artificialty he later puts into the film. Diary Of The Dead wants to make a point about screen violence and labours heavy handedly to be read as a comment about violence in our society from the war on terrorism to the looting and anarchy during Hurricane Katrina and for this Romero should be appluded. It is a shame that the end result is as muddled as the footage the film draws from. Diary Of The Dead collapses after an impressive opening under the weight of its own artifice. The acting and dialogue in the film is universally rather poor. This is no surpise though, part of the pleasure in many Romero outings is the inevitable hamminess of not only the actors but the roles written for them. What really shows the actors up in Diary Of The Dead is that we are being asked to identify with them in a naturalistic sense. It is almost as if Romero has bought his one of his weakest points to the forefront of proceedings. Conversely one of the strongest and powerful themes Romero works with, that of being trapped and the siege mentality which runs through The Crazies (1973) is not included here at all.

It is tempting to read The Diary Of The Dead as an elaborate riposte to Zack Snyders Dawn Of The Dead (2004) remake, this was where zombies were made fast and rabid for the MTV generation. Certainly those who expect something similar to this film might be disappointed at the amount of subtext in Diary Of The Dead. The end of the film is in itself is an overt criticism of the zombies for thrills approach and to its merit the apocalyptic feel the film has reminds us of the sheer base horror of the dead walking the earth for eternity. Which is all very interesting but Romero has told us the same messages with sublety elsewhere. Nowhere here does he
use his zombies to come close to surpassing his metaphor for consumerism and capitalism in the original Dawn Of The Dead (1978). Romero never succeeds in making his story gel and this is because there are too many ideas in the film, many underdeveloped and others treated hamfistedly. This is of course preferable to a lack of ideas but on the whole it is disappointing and provides no evidence that Romero has found his touch after Land Of The Dead (2005).
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