Not Dead Yet

Diary of the Dead rises from the grave revitalized.

by Shaun Brady

Recommended

PAR FOR THE CORPSE: Film students battle zombies between Pittsburgh and Philly. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

George A. Romero's Dead films have always reflected their political moment. In returning to the embryonic stages of his zombie epidemic, the director not only recontextualizes his shambling corpses from Vietnam to Iraq, but literally shifts his entire perspective: Diary of the Dead is told from the first-person, camera's-eye view of a group of self-absorbed film students making their way from the University of Pittsburgh to Philly (along a very Canadian route). The fifth entry also finds Romero revitalized by the freedom offered by shoestring filmmaking. The director's films tend to succeed in inverse relationship to their budgets, and Diary is a vast improvement over 2005's sprawling, unfocused Land of the Dead.

In the YouTube age, the handheld, character-wielded camera has become an all-pervasive meme. Romero's use of the tactic echoes both Cloverfield and Brian De Palma's Redacted in the credulity-stretching conceit that characters in the midst of life-threatening situations continue filming rather than getting directly involved in events unfolding directly in front of them, though he employs that concept to more compelling ends. Diary shares with Redacted the idea that a film student uses the camera to distance himself from shocking realities; and with Cloverfield the more intriguing suggestion that, surrounded by media, today's young people are simply unable to process their surroundings without an intervening media scrim.

For Cloverfield, the immediacy of the jostling, low-res image is simply a scare tactic, an (admittedly effective) attempt to drop audiences into the midst of a thrill-ride dash through a monster-infested Manhattan. Romero rarely uses the technique explicitly to generate scares. Fact is, despite the rampant gore, the series hasn't generated an honest-to-goodness horror film since the original Night of the Living Dead. While Night did have an underlying social commentary, it was an unrelentingly tense shocker; by the time of Dawn of the Dead, the satire came to the fore and the zombies were less frightening than pitiable, with black humor more prevalent than scares (hell, there's even a pie fight).

In Diary, the surprising result, given Romero's stubborn lifelong independence, is that this democratization of media has led not to more information but a cloud of voices that fractures truth into a multiplicity of competing opinions. With more voices only comes more spin, and though the troop of survivors are continually monitoring reports and downloading video, they come no closer to understanding what's happening. While he hammers his overall message with considerably less subtlety than in the original trilogy, this is a point that emerges strikingly from the construction of the film itself, and suggests that we hasten our own destruction by placing all ideas on an equal footing.

One aspect that comes as a shock: The leads this time out are, for the first time, all white. The presence of strong black and female characters have been a through line for the series, and it initially comes as a disappointment that the leads here so resemble the cast of any Hollywood "young Caucasians in peril" genre entry. But midway, Romero introduces a stronghold held by a group of well-armed African-Americans, who explicitly revel in the fact that they can finally have the upper hand after lives of oppression. There's a moment between the leader of this makeshift militia and the female lead that suggests that she'd be better off aligned with them, and there's an intriguing possibility for a parallel sequel in their story.

Romero's cynicism has increasingly edged toward misanthropy over the decades as his sympathies have shifted from living characters to dead, and Diary closes on an image that burns itself into the brain, a more effective evocation of the Abu Ghraib photos and other recent atrocities than the obvious referents in Land. Romero has used packs of zombie-hunting rednecks in several films as indicators of mindless inhumanity, the gleeful rush to kill as soon as a line is drawn between "them" and "us." But here their appearance in an epilogue following a character's ambiguous dying request to "Shoot me" leaves us to question whether he wishes not to return from the dead, or simply to be filmed while doing it. There's an equivalence drawn between those who partake in reprehensible acts and those who watch unblinkingly, and the film's final words query whether any are worth saving.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

Written and directed by George Romero

A Weinstein Co. release