Review of Diary of the Dead (2007) by Zoran S — 04 Sep 2010

I watched this again and think it plays much better the second time around. It overcomes most of the objections I had on first viewing.

Here is what I wrote the first time:

Diary of the Dead, to be sure, works better as agit-prop and social satire than as an aesthetic object. The film within a film conceit seems stale even if it's Romero's shortcut to his media critique. Moreover, its amateurish acting crosses the line from appropriate to the story line and becomes merely annoying to watch at times. Still, the anger and compassion that fuels the ideas behind the film are compelling and a pleasure to engage with.

The satirical focus of Diary of the Dead is delivered with a bit more bitterness than the last four Romero zombie films and reminds me more of Night of the Living Dead than the others, though not necessarily in quality. In particular, the last film Land of the Dead was the most aesthetically polished of the five films, but was also the least direct and therefore the least compelling in its social implications. This is not the case with Diary. Its main idea is that the proliferation of media images which often take the form of atrocity footage and the suffering of others and media sources such as the internet often contribute to obscuring truth about the world than revealing that the truth.

And so in regards to the "diary" the filmmakers are keeping for us in the film within the film in, Romero invites us to question what purpose it will ever serve. The humanistic conceit that the "diary" will provide a record for the future is questioned by the bleak idea conveyed wonderfully in the film's final images that just maybe there is nothing worth saving about humans, especially not the ones we see in those final images. We already are the walking dead.