George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead

[High Priest Mikhal]

Well, ol' George did it again and put out another Dead movie. This one isn't bad, but it's also not his greatest work. Maybe a 3 or 3.5 out of 5 stars. This one lacks the claustrophobia of his first three seminal works and the feeling of powerlessness in the face of overwhelming odds that were in Land and Diary. It is heavy on the human evils of pride, arrogance, and the perverse lengths to which we will go in the name of belief even in the face of Armageddon.

This one stars the actor who played Brubaker from Land of the Dead and one of the soldiers who held up the Winnebago in Diary of the Dead. Three weeks after the dead starting coming back, four National Guardsmen give up on the Guard, deciding to take a boat to an island off the coast of Delaware after learning about it from an Internet broadcast. To get there, though, they have to deal with the exiled Flynn, once a resident of Plum Island who was driven off by his lifelong rival, Muldoon, over ideological differences regarding what to do with the walking dead. Flynn favored putting them down, while Muldoon prefered to keep them around in hopes they could be turned to eating something other than humans.

While I won't give away anything else, the story can be a bit misleading. The zombies eat living humans not because they that's the only thing they know, it's because they want to; human flesh seems to be the most "palatable." In the very first movie, on the very first day (or night) it's revealed on a news broadcast the zombies will eat any warm blooded living creature--vermin, pets, livestock, so long as it's alive and endothermic. Isolated as they are from the rest of the world, though, it's not that surprising these survivors wouldn't have heard.

Another factoid that gets driven home, albeit not blatantly, is that zombism is not caused by the bite itself. Rather, the bite acts as a vector for a fast-acting, 100% lethal disease present in zombie body fluids; the bite merely transmits a disease which kills, while some external force acts animates the dead (in the original 1968 movie, it's radiation from the Venus Probe falling back to Earth that is directly or indirectly responsible).

Finally, in the introduction, Romero comes out and emphasizes for the umpteenth time that the zombies are not and never have been the true villains. That dishonor falls to the living.

All in all the movie is even more obvious regarding its theme than Diary was. The main character even says in narration that it's "Us vs. Them" to the point that people rally behind a flag until the cause of a conflict is forgotten and the only thing left is the cycle of conflict itself. Is Mr. Romero getting tired of veiling his messages in his old age? Or is he tired of people completely missing out on what he's trying to say in his films? I think it's both, personally.