So is there anything left to do of any particular interest with Romero's mythos of the living dead? And is there anything left to do that's worth bothering with when it comes to mock-verite film making? Yup. This is not a great movie, but it is a good one with some outstanding moments, and I'm glad I saw it.
The framework is exactly what Romero's been using all along: one day right about now, for no reason anyone will ever learn, the dead start coming back to life. They're mindless, slow, and completely focused on eating other people, who will join the slow carnival in their turn. "Now" back then was the late '60s; now it's the mid '00s, but people are still people and they still use whatever tools come to hand, in whatever ways seem wise and moral to them when they're driven mad with fear and can't think straight and are watching their own friends and loved ones become the enemy too. In this case the group of protagonists is a bunch of film students making a cheap horror movie for one of them to direct as his senior project, and their advisor. They trek from University of Pittsburgh across Pennsylvania in search of home and imagined shelter.
The film is presented as the edit made by one of the survivors, for information and warning. What distinguishes it from works like
Blair Witch Project and
Cloverfield is that these folks have good gear and know how to use it pretty well. (These are in general people at a higher level of self-awareness and competence than in other films in the same general category, without the particular intensity of revealed whacked-out-ness that makes
The Last Broadcast such a
thing.) There's very little tilting or zooming, and the editing actually does juxtapose multiple sources in the interests of clarity, where possible. The narration is too heavy-handed for its own good, alas; it would have been better with half the voice-overs stripped out, and perhaps some brief comments from others besides the main assembler added to the mix.
The major theme of Romero's life work is, I think, that while we don't exactly deserve painful death at the hands of the walking dead, we don't especially deserve anything better. Never mind potential, look at what we're actually doing, what we're always actually doing, and say with a straight face that we deserve the mercy we never bestow. No change in that here, but the manner of presentation is different. The story ends on a different kind of a beat than his previous work, almost a dialogue.
There's lumpy stuff in the mix. Besides the narration, I have real trouble believing some of the character backgrounds, some of the pacing feels draggy or rushed. But there are some really marvelous pieces, too. I am glad to have the emerging community of black survivors, and the note-perfect argument between the lead documenter and his girlfriend, and the limits of the panic room, and a bunch else. Very much worthwhile for horror fans.
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