Grandpa
Romero thought that a zombie movie about the interweb would be good
for the naughties. Somehow he also decided that found footage was an
acceptable style. The result is this bizarrely unintentional
throwback that feels false and pandering on every level. The people
don't seem real, as they talk about bloggers and hackers - I felt
like I was watching an episode of 'The Lone Gunmen' at times (bless
them, but they have gotten dated). Is anyone even blogging any more?
Let's
give the film a partial pass on that for being a decade old (at the
time of writing), despite being oddly misinformed and outdated even
in 2007. There are plenty of other major problems that I can talk
about.
T he
found footage element ties into this whole thing about the guy behind
the camera being a student film maker and wanting to document
everything and all that nonsense reasoning behind why he has for some
reason filmed everything literally until his death. For this reason
it's cute, if ridiculous, that he keeps giving people direction to
make it look better. The resulting movie really does look like a
student film, which it is in the fiction of the movie, to be fair,
but I think they did too good a job of it. If their aim really was to
make it realistically lame, well done! That doesn't subtract from the
fact that this is a lame movie, though, and most of it doesn't seem
self-aware (and the scenes that do, are so blatantly self-aware that
they become unintentionally ridiculous.
The
writing of this movie was some of the worst I've seen in a while,
resulting in some laughable dialogue. The bad acting didn't help, and
because of this none of the characters really feel like real people.
I thought I'd like the English guy, but just like everyone else he
grew too overtly cliché to be enjoyable. There are also SO many long
exposition scenes that no one seemed to even try and disguise with
other things happening. The film literally stops for a few minutes to
give the characters a chance to tell us what's happening and how they
feel about one another. There are also lots of repeated scenes or
clips of dialogue, for no apparent reason. Stuff that's happened less
than twenty minutes ago is repeated in flashbacks in case we've
forgotten about them already.
The one bright side I can see here is that there is still the occasional imaginative zombie dispatching, but many of them cross the line into being too silly for me at this point.
Diary of the Dead: 31.0