If people all over the world are rising from their graves to kill the living, and the newly dead in turn rise and do the same, doesn't that equalize everyone, everywhere, no matter our fleeting, mortal differences? As one terrified voice-overheard squealing over a radio during a tense scene-puts it, the issue for humanity, when the dead are roaming wherever they please, is no longer the sanctity of borders between people; it's the disappearance of the border between life and death.
Even more than in Romero's earlier films, the outsiders in "Diary" are clearly the living. Outnumbered by shambling zombies and with no uniform strategy for survival, ordinary people fall prey to their narrowest instincts.
Driving several days through an increasingly chaotic Pennsylvania landscape rife with meandering dead, "Diary"'s band of college students encounters a marauding militia, a makeshift fiefdom hoarding weapons and supplies. They also encounter such willful naivete and brutality among the living that one character asks, at a key moment, are we worth saving?
Romero, in a dark-even Swiftian-mood, finds the ubiquity of cameras and the impulse to record, edit and upload our every core experience far more insulating than liberating. "Diary"'s handful of film student characters (plus one spiritually exhausted film professor, played by Scott Wentworth) initially chafe at constant filming (by one of their own) of their terrifying first encounters with the dead.
But as days wear on, the line between reality and unreality-viewing begins to vanish. The processing of an unprecedented calamity as a personal video provides the cameraman an illusion of purposeful distancing from actuality.
It is at the point in "Diary" where two characters are holding cameras and shooting each other during the same life-and-death moments that all hope somehow seems lost.
Craftily, Romero has made a film that ultimately watches itself, with a perspective that is given over to its characters' malaise and self-absorption while the dead walk. At such moments, "Diary" is as much a revelation as an obituary for a once-thriving species called humankind.
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