"It used to be us against us. Now it's us against them. But they're also us."
In the context of man vs zombies, this sounds like an obvious and stupid line. But spoken with such gravity in the film by one of its characters, you'd have to be really slow to not pick up on how important that line is meant to sound. The film posits that we have a tendency to demonize "the enemy" (you know who they are) and detach ourselves from them, forgetting that they are still "us," just "turned" into something puzzlingly hostile.
Too on-the-nose and close to home? Welcome to George Romero's world, where thick politics and gory fun collide. The fact that the lines sound forced and the acting horrendous don’t change the fact that Romero always has an inventive way to make his thinly veiled morality tales exciting, even if the execution trips a little.
Diary of the Dead tells the story of a group of film students and their alcoholic professor making a Mummy movie in the woods, when the zombie epidemic suddenly hits and they not only have to fight to survive, but decide to document the entire thing also. Clueing us in on what Diary is going to be—which is a rather nihilistic take on modern civilization—the professor corrects one of his students when the unimpressed boy says they're just making a stupid horror movie. "With an underlying social commentary!" he proclaims, which almost sounds like Romero half-jokingly issuing a challenge to other horror movies. In the same scene, Diary even makes fun of the idea of zombies running, asserting how stupid the notion is and turning it into a gag later in the movie. Both remarks can be taken as jabs at Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake… and why not? Assume away.
Being a first-person "monster" movie, the comparison to Cloverfield is inevitable, especially to those looking at the surface. Upon watching the film, however, it's obvious how widely different they are, both in style and intention. While Cloverfield lifts the "found footage" premise from The Blair Witch Project, Diary is a mockumentary. In Diary's world, the footage we are watching was actually cut and put together by the characters, deliberately, into a horror movie to both scare and educate viewers—which is what Romero has been doing for decades with his own horror movies.
What's most impressive about Diary is that it feels like a coherent satire even though it's commenting and criticizing multiple facets of society in every other scene, and then reverses the target of that commentary. In one scene, it seems to criticize the lies of the mainstream media, but then later it diminishes bloggers for muddling the truth by presenting too many voices. We can only conclude that Romero is a pessimist who hates everything, but is that so?
With Diary, Romero is actually commenting on the art of filmmaking and editing, rather than the YouTubification culture that Cloverfield was evoking. While Cloverfield's entire suspense is rooted in the fact that it's first-person POV, Diary barely makes use of the gimmick. At least no more than your average horror movie does when it switches perspectives for certain scenes. Watching Diary of the Dead feels like watching a conventional zombie movie. It never calls attention to the gimmick with shaky cam or the like. Romero's purpose was not to get cheap thrills, but to use it as a commentary on documentary filmmaking and journalism in general. The camera doesn’t lie. That is, until it makes its way to the cutting room.
There's an old adage in filmmaking: that it’s impossible to make an objective film free of bias, or to tell the truth like it is. Why? Because the very fact that we’re pointing the camera at something means we are, as a filmmaker, choosing the audience’s point of view for them. Therefore it is not the real truth. In the movie, a zombie attack occurs while the camera is charging its battery. One character then asks, “If it wasn’t on camera, it’s like it never happened, right?” Good question. Ask the falling tree in the woods. Similarly, the levels of human emotions are dictated by the coverage the cameraman got. When a tragic event is shown, the voiceover narration reminds the audience that she could’ve left that part out of the movie, but didn’t, emphasizing again the power of film editing.
All things aside, it’s just a killer zombie movie. It contains awesome gore, great settings, just the right dose of black comedy, some inventive kills, and the most badass Amish guy in the history of everything. Quite easily the best Romero movie since Dawn of the Dead.
"Diary of the Dead" opens February 15, 2008 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by George A Romero. Written by George A. Romero. Starring Shawn Roberts, Joshua Close, Scott Wentworth, Michelle Morgan, Joe Dinicol.
