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George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

  MPAA Rating: R
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George A. Romero is no stranger to the zombie film. His Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were splatterfests infused with political commentary and a dash of humor. Romero makes use of this formula again in his latest picture, Diary of the Dead. Unfortunately, after an intriguing opening, it’s clear that there are not enough of these winning elements to keep the picture chugging along.

Diary chronicles the journey of a group of University of Pittsburgh film students and their professor, who are filming a schlocky mummy movie when a zombie outbreak occurs. The students decide to document the apocalyptic events as they unfold using the film equipment they already have.

With this one simple spin, Romero tries to introduce a host of politics. The most obvious allusion he makes is to the effects of YouTube culture (there are multiple scenes involving people continuing to film someone getting gnawed on by a zombie rather than helping them). The film makes no attempt to hide its lambasting of the news media, who are shown attempting to instill a false sense of calm in the public while taking forever to acknowledge that the zombie epidemic has not, in fact, been caused by terrorism or immigration.

With the media unreliable, the only way people can get the “truth” is by viewing movies posted on blogs, like the ones our protagonists upload (Why people are reading blogs during the apocalypse is beyond me). This raises a problem of logic: how and why can the government and media organizations continue to suppress the all-too-obvious truth when their institutions have collapsed ten minutes into the film?

Those willing to look past the heavy political aspects of the film for some good ol’ fashioned zombie gore or humor will be disappointed, as the film contains relatively little of either. Scares, even of the “popping out from behind the door” variety are few and far between. Gore is used surprisingly sparingly, though what little there is often satisfies; A scythe through the face? Awesome!

You might get a few chuckles from Romero’s lambasting of other zombie movies, such as the fast-moving zombies of 28 Days Later (“They’re dead. How can they run without their ankles shattering?” a student wonders. Oh, and don’t worry; the zombies in this film are the traditional slow variety), but there’s not enough satire here to make it a selling point of the movie.

Diary of the Dead is by no means a bad movie, but it does nothing to distinguish itself from the hordes of zombie movies we’ve been inundated with in recent years either. The heavy social commentary only carries the film so far, and neither the gore nor the comedic aspects of the film are enough to round it out into a satisfying whole. Rest assured, though; Romero is bound to give the zombie genre another shot.