Diary of the Dead
2007
Dir. George Romero
It’s been a while since I watched Diary of the Dead. A small part of me was so burnt by Survival of the Dead that I wasn’t sure I could handle going back and watching Romero’s previous entry to the Dead Saga because I remember my awkward feelings of disappointment with it all too well.
Land of the Dead was a let down, but at least mildly amusing and slick. There was a lot of great ideas in it and I was always fascinated by Whistler’s Green. Dennis Hopper out-weighed the awfulness of John Leguizamo and the growing sense of unease as zombies seemed to “learn” off-set the rather naff fireworks as distractions premise.
Diary, however, was and still is, the first serious mis-step. With a concept as old and hackneyed as the hills (film all shot in faux-documentary style) it suffers from the get-go of never being able to nail the feel appropriately. It tries to present the events realistically, but right from the beginning feels too staged. The dialogue is too obviously crafted and too unbelievably delivered. What should have been a deeply disturbing opening sequence involving a news-crew documenting a resurrection on camera, instead becomes something cheesy and over-acted.
Unfortunately the rest of the film suffers the exact same problems over and over again. Not one moment feels real, despite the first person view. None of the characters are drawn any further than their visual appearance. They have no interesting history, traits, attitudes or ideas. They are poorly acted and about as emotional as the undead they are trying to flee from. Half the characters are instantly forgettable, the others are little more than pathetic stereotypes. There’s the “Obsessive Film Student” who will sacrifice everything for a good story. There’s the “Torn Yet Dutiful Girlfriend” who just wants her boyfriend to see sense but instead of shouting at him that he’s a complete arsehole who deserves to die, sticks with him. And then there’s the hilariously bad “Alcoholic Film Lecturer” who served in ‘Nam and so doesn’t want to touch a gun again. And is also an archery champion. Yes, really.
It’s not all bad. There are some neat ideas, but they are so heavy handed that it’s hard to give Romero due credit because he no longer seems to think that audiences are smart enough to work out what he is getting at. the opening of the movie features a group of students filming their own monster movie with shambling zombie and luscious beauty tearing through the woods. There is some post-modern meta-textual referencing about the speed the undead can travel and why certain cliches always happen, and then, at the end of the movie, the same events reoccur, but this time they are “real”. Rather than allowing the audience to discover this on their own, Romero actually has a character say out loud, “this is just like the movie we were making.” Thanks for hammering that point home, George.
There’s an interesting comment on how the internet has take over as a major news source and as an un-biased information high-way in which to keep the world in the loop, but instead of sharing valuable information, all the characters seems keen on doing is showing the world their own experiences. Somehow I can’t imagine people who are going through their own traumatic experiences logging on and checking out other peoples tales of misery.
A potentially smart concept in which it is discovered the media are retelling events to their own ends – a Rupert Murdoch style twisting of reality which in itself could haven been used to tell a tale of two completely different perspectives of the same event – is dropped quickly as the television stations apparently stop working, yet the internet stays alive.
Romero’s understanding of the way people now work in documenting their own lives on the internet is spot-on, but the representation of it in this film is appalling. Every piece of technology bleeps and tweets. Every five minutes a sombre voice-over appears telling us about “uploading”, “bloggers”, “downloading” and “hacking”. The point becomes over-laboured. No-body talks in such austere tones when describing these events, they have become second-nature to our culture, almost mundane, yet the characters all talk as if what they are doing will become the thing no-one else will have thought of and so will all respect the documentary (which isn’t very good anyway). In truth, people would have already tagged a load of photos on Facebook and stated their kills on Twitter.
With the attitude to the internet so off-kilter with the rest of the modern world, it makes all the characters unrelatable. Again, if the angle had been to expose a greater truth it might have worked. Instead it’s merely annoying.
There are some nice deaths, and some creative use of weapons, but when that is really the only decent thing you can speak about in relation to the movie, you know you’re in trouble. It’s a two-star movie at best, and that is being generous.
