George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
Written and directed by George A. Romero
The Weinstein Co.
2008
Rating:


Legendary horror director George A. Romero returns to the zombie movies that made him famous – and which he most recently visited with 2005's "Land of the Dead" – with "Diary of the Dead," a first-person video chronicle of a global zombie epidemic.

Though they had no shared characters, "Night of the Living Dead," "Dawn of the Dead," "Day of the Dead" and "Land of the Dead" all seemed to exist in the same universe, with each film escalating the zombie threat of the one that came before. "Diary," however, is an apparent reboot that begins as the dead first start coming back to life. "Diary's" distance from the other "Dead" films is a relief since it allows the films from "Night" to "Land" to form a near-perfect tetralogy of terror and social commentary; the inclusion of "Diary" would've sullied that esteemed franchise's name.

The greatness of the "Dead" tetralogy rests as much with its queasy gore as with its subtext. Like John Updike with his "Rabbit" tetralogy, Romero and his films presciently dissected the flaws of American society almost once per decade: in the 1960s of "Night," it was the defective values of the American family; in the 1970s of "Dawn," consumerism; "Day" reacted against Reaganite America; and "Land" exposed the continued disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

It can only be disappointing that in 2008 Romero's target is blogs.

"Diary" begins dispiritingly with aspiring filmmaker Jason Creed (Joshua Close) filming a creature feature about a mummy. Jason continues rolling his camera after he calls cut to document his complaints about the too-fast mummy portrayal by Ridley (Philip Riccio) – in a takedown of the "28 Days Later" movies and the "Dawn" remake, Jason complains the dead can't move that quickly because it would snap their rigor-ed ankles. The decision to comment on other horror movies immediately takes "Diary" out of the sophisticated realm of the "Dead" and "28" series and places it in the dominion of the many winking horror movies that followed "Scream" without ever successfully recapturing Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's adoration for the genre they thrillingly spoofed.

Jason's movie comes to a permanent end when news arrives over the radio (the radio!) the dead are coming back to life. Crew member Tony (Shawn Roberts) insists it's all a hoax to sell soap, but Jason believes the threat is real and needs to be documented by him since the corporate media is sure to botch the truth.

Therein lies the flaw of "Diary." As coverage of the War on Terror, the run-up to the Iraq War and the Iraq War itself has proven, the media often lets the American people down when it allows the government and corporate interests to bury real news. Amateur documentarians and blogs aren't without their flaws, but many of them present journalistic truth unfiltered. "Diary" attempts to deflate those bloggers while at the same time admitting the manipulation of the mainstream media; Romero can't have his human brains and eat them, too.

Many of the disapproving reviews of "Cloverfield" negatively compared the J.J. Abrams-produced monster movie to "Diary" (it screened at the Toronto Film Festival and Fantastic Fest in September 2007) because Romero's film supposedly contains the distancing devices of Bertolt Brecht in its "YouTube Generation" bashing. A world in which the life-scarring "2 Girls 1 Cup" exists is worthy of parody, but someone who wants to document the actual existence of zombies doesn't seem completely worthy of derision. "Diary" does provocatively probe questions of the journalist-subject relationship and to what extent the journalist should drop the documentation posing and become actively involved, but it's a one-note provocation idiotically answered.

It doesn't help that, except for Debra and a few survivalists encountered along the way, the main characters of "Diary" are uniformly insipid, the kind of shallow beings the heroes of "Cloverfield" are accused of being but weren't to those who were paying attention.

The main problem with "Diary" is precisely its decision to follow Brechtian impulses rather than actual storytelling ones and that it lacks the immediacy of "Cloverfield" and "The Blair Witch Project." "Blair Witch" and "Cloverfield" are horrifying because of their "You Are There" perspectives. "Diary," however, is a documentary within the film titled "The Death of Death" that's narrated by Jason's girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) and has been edited between two cameras that were used. That the other camera is often seen contributes to "Diary's" distancing and consistent failure to connect with the audience in an emotional or even terrifying way.


Ultimately, "Diary" shares less in common with "Blair Witch" or "Cloverfield" than it does with Brian De Palma's 2007 film "Redacted." Using the same Brecht and Godard influences, the use of "Web site" footage and an amateur documentarian, DePalma attempted to tell the true story of the vengeance-based gang rape of 14-year-old Iraqi Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the murder of her and her family by American soldiers. The result is the worst film of De Palma's career, just as "Diary" is Romero's least film.

The reason "Redacted" and "Diary" fail where "Cloverfield" and "Diary" succeed is that it's impossible to envision the latter as anything but a first-person film because its narrative strategy is so firmly linked to what could've otherwise been a gimmick, while the former would've benefited from being told through more traditional means. "Redacted" is especially frustrating since it should've been the "Casualties of War" of Iraq. "Diary," meanwhile, could've attacked media manipulation by having one of its characters be an ethically challenged journalist more invested in the big story and the great shot than in trying to save those around him rather than entirely focusing on a group of characters whose deaths can't come quickly enough.

For the first time in the 40-year history of the "Dead" films, Romero doesn't have anything interesting to say.

Posted Sunday, February 17, 2008

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/diary.of.the.dead