It's inevitable that a lot of reviews are going to compare this subjective-camera horror movie to the Blair Witch Project, so before I start on my stock standard Romero-praise, I may as well jump on that bandwagon. I'll focus on the differences between them, because the similarities pretty much start and end with "there's a character behind the camera".
The first thing you notice is that this film is, in the best of traditions, a melodrama before it's a 'mockumentary'. It's got the type of structure, dialogue and characterisation that Romero always uses. This is both a good and bad thing. The good thing is that it's frequently hilarious, and as usual the writing itself is watertight all-round. The characters all have decent arcs, their dialogue is sterling silver, but they've also got enough entertaining individual moments so that you're never under any illusions as to what you're watching: it's not a "pretend it's real" style fake-doco at all.
That's where a slight problem creeps in: the documentary format is obviously employed for satirical purposes (more on that later), which means that it tends to look a bit out-of-place when no explicit piss-taking is happening. The acting is mostly good, but it's not naturalistic at all. I'm guessing there wasn't a lot of improv on set, and despite the longer shots, the scenes are paced exactly like any other action/adventure/drama. Characters take contemplative pauses in the heat of an emotional moment, gesticulate in wildly unnatural ways - all the sorts of things that you generally don't notice in a regular movie. It's not completely distracting, but sometimes it feels closer to an episode of "24" than a documentary. Again, no bad thing in itself, but you can't help thinking that nobody was entirely sure how far they wanted to take the documentary thing, because the pacing tends to fall back onto traditional film 'beats', rather than those of say, theatre, which would probably be more fitting.
But it's not just in the shooting and the performances. If it was, then that would be fine. I mean, Night Of The Living Dead was effective partly because it was so newsreel-esque; it's entirely appropriate, to be frank, to adapt that sense of real-world immediacy for the post-blog, post-Youtube environment we now find ourselves in.
Romero shoots himself in the foot a bit, though, by also using voice-over narration and using these candid, "out-take interview" style moments, to help us get to know the characters. Ostensibly it's to make the documentary feel more 'authentic', but it actually does the opposite: A documentary is a mass of footage assembled into a narrative in post-production (I know that's an oversimplification, but you know what I mean, right?), but in punctuating the storyline with these deliberate 'interruptions', the ultimate linearity (and therefore the artifice) of the narrative is revealed. Put simply, it feels more like the main character is documenting a straight-forward storyline, rather than shaping raw footage into one. This to me is a more significant issue than the acting style employed (I mean, love it or hate it, the lady in the Blair Witch Project wasn't a great actress, but you believed her because the narrative was constructed intimately around her).
It's as though the main cameraman, Jason (other camera people come in later), is shooting people who just happen to be making a zombie movie, rather than people who genuinely find themselves in one.
So the satire, then. The machine that George is raging against this time round is the role of the media. It's a very attractive subject for a media nerd like me, and Romero completely and utterly nails it. I suspect that without the documentary framing device, this could have been my favourite Dead film. The main point is that all media is bullshit, whether it's being manipulated by "The System" or whether it's just due to the composer's individual biases. You know this, and I know this, and I really like the fact that a popcorn-y horror film is making it accessible. The point itself is explored in several ways, but I'll just talk about two, because there's plenty more for you lot to find on your own, and in that regard the film is a very rewarding one.
The film opens with the raw camera footage of a news crew, reporting on a murder-suicide. Returning to Romero's apparent love for watching live TV crews get caught unprepared (exactly the sort of irony that I get a kick out of in his films), as the paramedics are wheeling the corpses away, they naturally wake up and start eating. After a couple of people get bitten, the cops on the scene manage to shoot the original zombies. It's later revealed that this raw footage was uploaded to the internet by the TV cameraman, because he wanted to show "the truth" - that explains how we get to see the reporter lady get chomped in all her uncensored glory, and more tellingly, prior to that we get to see her ask the paramedic meat-wagon not to park in-shot, because it would block the view of the corpses (something to which the driver cheerfully agrees).
This opening sequence is repeated several times on TVs and computer screens throughout the film, edited differently each time to change the context (Romero makes a cameo as a military general spliced into the footage on one broadcast). The point about the artificiality of it all is reasonably well-made, but another mis-step here is that Romero uses the voice-over narration as his own direct mouthpiece, so it becomes a bit heavy-handed: the primary cameraman character zooms into a telly at one point and says "Hey look, they've edited the footage!". I'm reluctant to say that Romero is getting lazy, but he certainly seems to be getting more desperate to get his message across (perhaps justifiably). This film is the closest he's ever made to a pure editorial. It's quite uncharacteristic in that normally he's happy to let the audience extrapolate the 'message' in a more natural way, by simply having the characters play out naturally.
And that dovetails into the second example of the media's artificiality that I want to talk about. Far more effective are the scenes where characters ask - or refuse to discuss - exactly why they're filming everything. I vaguely remember this being touched on in an incidental way in the Blair Witch project (one of those bastard campers says something about the camera being attractive because it 'filters reality' or something), but Romero blows it wide open here. You're never quite sure if Jason is refusing to help people in trouble because he's scared, or because he wants to capture everything as it happens without being involved. That's the real strength of the characters here ("are they completely ambivalent about the cataclysm, or are they completely committed to helping people by documenting it"?), and it sort of sums up the film as a whole: on the one hand it's a very uneven film because of the way it's handled, but it's that very same uncertainty that means you're never quite sure where the drama ends and the satire starts. In a sense, maybe the unevenness is sort of the point. Maybe Romero's duping his audience as much as he's taking a swipe at the media as a whole.
There's a lot to be had from this film but like anything worthwhile, it's better that you get it yourself. I'll finish up with some fanboy-ness.
The gore is not extreme and theatrical, obviously, but Romero's obvious love for the horror genre means we still get plenty of little concessions to it, to make sure that we're enjoying ourselves. There's a lot of CGI grue on display, as in Land Of The Dead, but it's handled more creatively here. There's still a (I suspect deliberate) slightly cartoonish look to the CGI (check out the zombie getting his brain dissolved by acid - brilliant and hilarious!), but some artificial camera shake and and motion tracking applied in post-production means that you get the right combination of veracity and comic-book fantasy from those sequences. The film's tone doesn't change during them. Elsewhere, the long, handheld takes mean that there's not a great deal of prosthetic gore: there's none of the trademark throats-being-torn-out-in-close-up, for instance, just because it would be too easy to spot (most neck biting is of the 'turn away from the camera' or 'the zombie's head is hunched over the wound' variety), and that means that instead of big spurts of blood, you just get blood covertly splashed onto the actors by the zombies, etc. The overall effect certainly isn't diminished, however.
Finally, two classic Romero tropes are revisited: the zombie on a gurney leaning over and having his guts fall out is recreated here, with the added benefit of a digital zoom from the cameraman so we can see it up close; and, thank god, the famous Clown Zombie shows up once more.
I can't say this is the classic film I was secretly hoping for, and I suspect people obsessed with Romero's previous output will find it more rewarding than a general audience will. Not to say that the great things in it will go over the heads of the uninitiated, but at times I can't help wondering if you need to be a bit Romero-familiar to get exactly where he's coming from.
If I had to give it a rating (fuckin' hate ratings, me) I'd say maybe 8 out of 10. Thankyou and goodnight.
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