Dear Diary: Braaaaains!

Back in the early '90s Roger Waters put out an album called Amused to Death. Like most of Waters's oeuvre, the album dealt with issues of alienation; in this he frets about the powerful technologies massed in the hands of a species not far removed from climbing out of the primodial soup: tribal warfare on a global scale, thanks to smart technology, delivered to your television 24 hours a day. Violence shades into entertainment; entertainment into violence. People still ruled by primitive gods at "command of a nuclear submarine."

If Waters is disturbed by humanity at a macro level, George Romero, in Diary of the Dead, has similar concerns on a micro scale: technology alienating individuals from each other, and from life, and death. This makes sense: in Waters's time the touchstones were MTV and CNN, worldwide corporate emblems of 24-hour television, infotainment. Now technologies have become personalized: YouTube, MySpace, iPods. The new media of the internet has created an army of citizen journalists.

If only Romero had grappled with the nuances of the Internet Age; instead his latest film comes across as redundant, inchoate ramblings. It's too little sharp social commentary and too much "You kids get off my damn lawn! And take your Internets with you!" Diary of the Dead is the stitched-together video of a film student, Jason, caught up in the first night of the rising of the dead: his only sure course of action being to record what's happening and upload it to his MySpace page (and taking note of the number of hits). His girlfriend Debra is frustrated by finding herself at the business end of a camera at all times, but she seems resigned to it more often than she fights it. And we know she's given over completely because it's her voice narrating the film.

Indeed, the first-person perspective isn't just alienating for the characters, it's alienating for the audience. Much of the violence and horror (there is actually not that much for a Romero film) is antiseptic. It's partly the POV, and partly that in creating characters distant from each other, Romero neglects to create characters interesting to watch on their own merits. The nerd, the pretty Texan (with an implausible accent), the alcoholic professor, all types lined up to play their parts. It's hard to blame the technology for not caring when they meet their respective fates: it's that they're boring.

Romero does have an argument, of course. He's not the only one to observe the potentially degrading effects of a world that interfaces through screens. But the nuances of the debate are given short shrift. When Jason argues that his videos might help people, Debra puts him down shortly by saying only that he always has an argument for what he does. It would be a good argument if he believed it, and that the camera was not a shield for him from the world dying around him, but he doesn't and it is. A video uploaded from Japan shows a woman giving advice on how to deal with the dead. But it's ultimately meaningless. Whatever valuable information there is to exchange is going to be lost on people who can't communicate with the person next to them.

And somewhere in there is an interesting film, but it's not this film, because (much like Waters, actually) Romero can't resist driving the point home. The scenes of Jason pissing off his friends by training his camera on them are repeated ad nauseum, as are Debra's observations about his disconnection. Other commentary, such as those aimed at the government and old media for failings in Iraq and New Orleans, are random and obvious. The film never feels like a coherent piece, but more like the frustrations of someone who knows things have gone wrong, but can't quite put their finger on just why, or how.