#7 - Diary of the Dead (2007)
(dir. George A. Romero)
This is Romero's 5th zombie film, and represents somewhat of a return to his roots in Night of the Living Dead. Here, he follows a group of college students who are out shooting a film when the zombies first appear, and we share their point of view over the first few days of the outbreak. By presenting the story in a sort of "found footage"/documentary style, Romero tries to give us a more intimate account of the events. This film comes really close to being good, but I think it ends up falling short.
The fatal flaw here is that Romero clearly has no idea how to make an effective found footage film - just having your characters occasionally look at the camera and say, "Are you still filming this? Stop filming this!" is not enough. There are a ton of scenes that would be fine in a traditionally-shot movie, but make absolutely no sense here. How is it that the cameraman always knows where to point the camera? He seems to always know who is going to speak next, or where the next zombie is going to come from, and never fails to move the camera at exactly the right time to catch everything. The acting is completely unconvincing as well. And what kind of found footage film has a fully orchestrated score? There is not a single scene in this movie that feels even remotely like "real" footage.
If Romero had just shot this film normally, I think it could've actually come out as a very good zombie movie. The story is decent, there are a lot of good special effects (minus some obvious CGI), and there are some scenes that are actually pretty tense and scary. Instead, we got a movie that, while mildly entertaining, more or less completely fails at trying to do something different. There are certainly much worse zombie films out there, but this one is ultimately not really worth your time.
Comments
Post a Comment