DIARY OF THE DEAD

Some college students are making a horror movie with their film professor when they learn from the radio that the dead are rising and attacking the living. The guys then head to the women's dormitory to pick up Debra, Jason's girlfriend, the film's director, and then flee to a safe place. During the journey, Jason has the idea to film everything they encounter on the road. The result of the filming is "The Death of Death," a documentary about the zombie epidemic that tells all the truths that the media have silenced. Forty years after "Night of the Living Dead" and just two years after "Land of the Dead," George Romero continues his very personal social critique in the form of a horror metaphor, and with "Diary of the Dead" he targets the world of information. Conceptually speaking, Romero hits the mark again by weaving a fierce and cynical reflection on the role of the media in shaping the informational agenda of contemporary man. On the one hand, we have the concept of "pervasiveness" of the media that fits well with the current condition in which every moment of our day, every gesture, every choice is often linked to the world of communication media. We know certain things because we have learned them from the media; we make purchasing choices because we are often influenced by the media, and so on. The media guide us, can manipulate us, can drug us, and keep us in a constant state of alert/relaxation. At the same time, however, the media have become accessible to everyone and, above all thanks to the advent of the internet, the condition of consumer has been superimposed on that of producer of media content: the "prosumer" is the evolution of the "homo videns" of Sartorian memory, a sort of homo videns-faber. Romero revolves around these concepts by showing the viewer how the news leak generated by a group of young filmmakers who embody his ego is extremely clearer and more truthful than the confused, fallacious, and manipulated "official communications" that plague TV, radio, newspapers, and more authoritative websites. To give credibility to his speech and to create a thematic-stylistic unity, the director relies on the technique of mockumentary, the false documentary made famous by "The Blair Witch Project." Perhaps it is this desire for stylistic novelty that decrees one of the great limits of "Diary of the Dead," but not because this language was not suitable for the story written by Romero (on the contrary, great intuition!), rather because the director has shown himself to be somewhat indecisive and awkward about how to stage the mockumentary effect. Romero is an excellent "classic" director, he loves the dear old monsters of yesteryear (his protagonist is making a movie about a mummy) and he wants to claim the concept of the slow-moving living dead, so he could not deny a halo of classicism to his film. So be it: "Diary of the Dead" is only partially a mockumentary, since the shots are clean, almost all still, there are sound effects (even alternations of sound planes!), voice-over, soundtrack, and refined editing. The mockumentary effect, in practice, is only held by the subjective shots. Romero justifies himself, making his protagonist pronounce at the opening of the film a motivation for everything the viewer is about to watch, since "Diary of the Dead" is nothing more than "The Death of Death," Jason's documentary, edited and accompanied by music and sound effects designed to scare. This device creates a strange effect that smells of uncertainty and indecision, does not fully engage the viewer, flattens the events, and instead of creating an aura of realism manages to create a constant area of falsity. Another negative element of "Diary of the Dead" is the lack of characterization in the characters, perhaps too many and too aligned with the standard of "types" from teen movies. With little depth, we see respectively: the rich and carefree guy who sleeps with the most beautiful girls, the nerdy kid who first understands how to kill the zombies, the fragile girl who ends up going crazy, the blonde airhead who shows her breasts, the cynical and alcoholic adult, the rude and loyal black man, the sly and criminal military man. In short, probably the overcrowding created some problems for the director and screenwriter with the management of the characters. But "Diary of the Dead" is certainly a film that speaks more to the brain and the heart, as often happens in the works of the Master, and overlooking the uncertainty of the staging and the flatness of the characters (two considerable elements nonetheless) remains the always valid reflection on the pettiness of the human being and the increasingly critical condition of the society that hosts us. "First we were against ourselves, then we became against them... only they are us," pronounces the voice-over of the protagonist, bringing with a few words to the axiom that moves the film and the omnia of the director, summarized also by the final image that refers with lucid circularity to the closure of the masterpiece "Night of the Living Dead."