Bashing George Romero’s newer Dead films has become one of these tiresome fashions, like complaining about George Lucas ruining your childhood or going on about how R.E.M. were so much better before they were popular. (They weren’t.)
These are probably the two main reasons:
- Romero has refused to repeat himself, with each movie taking a completely different approach to the story and questioning many of our assumptions.
- The old movies have become enshrined as “classics” by a generation of nostalgia-obsessed geeks, and to ensure the holiness of “the originals” everything new has to be bashed.
Thus many people quickly dismissed Land of the Dead, possibly the best entry in the series, despite its thoughtfulness (or perhaps because of it), its politics, its interesting setting and characters. Land of the Dead was a rare thing: a zombie movie full of moments of poetry and grace – as well as horror and gore.
Diary of the Dead was a very serious – again I have to use the word thoughtful, which I think really describes Romero’s work – movie about the media, new and old. Unlike the dreadful and unrealistic Cloverfield, Diary gave its characters a reason for carrying around the camera – they’re trying to make a documentary – and actually had them use the camera like real people would, not like monkeys on ecstasy.
In a fascinating little twist, Survival of the Dead picks up from one of the most powerful scenes in Diary, in which our protagonists are robbed by a group of soldiers. When we first saw Diary, we were distinctly impressed by Alan Van Sprang as the menacing colonel who leads said group, and now he becomes the primary protagonist of Survival. It’s a little thing, but it’s incredibly cool.
Survival of the Dead follows a group of soldiers (and a young man they pick up on the way) as they travel to a place called Plum Island, where they think they might be safe from the zombies. But Plum Island has its own problems, namely a feud between two old Irish families who have very different ideas about how to treat the zombies.
And this is one of the major questions the movie raises: what should we do, ethically speaking, with the zombies? Is it better to kill them? Could you kill them if they were children, or your own family? What if they can learn to be different? We immediately assume that they can’t, but why? But then, when zombies are so dangerous to us and our own, isn’t it perhaps more than a little insane to hang on to them because they were once human? Shouldn’t we learn to let go of the dead? The answers are not very simple, and the movie doesn’t tell us what to think.
But it does add an interesting perspective to the plot of Land of the Dead, in which we see that zombies can acquire intelligence, and in which we start really feeling for them. Land of the Dead is set much later, at a time when humanity is more organized and less in danger of the undead; combining that setting and those events with the story of Survival of the Dead leads to some interesting questions.
If the one major theme of the movie is the question of the undead, the other one is the question of the living. In Survival of the Dead, humans are more of a danger to each other than zombies. The movie illustrates in detail the idiotic behaviour we humans are capable of, without ever being misanthropic. I’m particularly fascinated by how the movie allocates rightness and wrongness to its two warring sides. It’s very specific, managing to avoid clichés like “everyone is equally wrong” or “they’re all fanatics”. They’re all wrong but in different ways, and some are fanatics where others are hypocrites.
As usual, what gets very little attention from critics in a Romero movie is the writing and the performances. Which is a shame, because the writing is sharp and witty and excellent – the movie has several laugh-out-loud lines and the characters are well-drawn and layered. In every other movie, Francisco (Stefano Colacitti) would be the cliché Latino stud; here we can see further layers under the machismo, and the character feels entirely real and likeable. The same goes for Tomboy (Athena Karkanis), who is a lot more than your standard-issue “tough dyke” character.
So, is this movie perfect? No, it isn’t. While pretty much every ingredient works – good cinematography, fitting music, great actors, good writing – the movie leans a bit too heavily in the direction of satire sometimes. All of Romero’s movies have this element, but usually it’s a bit better-integrated. In Survival, there tends to be a slight disconnect between the satire and more dramatic bits. Most of the humour itself works brilliantly, but the all-out satirical bits (especially at the end) seem a little out of place, even though their meaning is clear and powerful.
But having a few flaws does not prevent Survival of the Dead from being a good movie, and a worthy entry in the Dead series. Romero continues his thought experiment from Night of the Living Dead, adding more and more layers and perspectives. This is more than most directors can dream of.
Interesting links:
@ “In every other movie, Francisco (Stefano Colacitti) would be the cliché Latino stud; here we can see further layers under the machismo, and the character feels entirely real and likeable. The same goes for Tomboy (Athena Karkanis), who is a lot more than your standard-issue ‘tough dyke’ character”
No, they’re not. One dimensional cliches is EXACTLY what they are.
And this is true because… you say so? There were several scenes in the movie that easily refute your claims.