Survival of the Dead

I think just about every director has that one movie in their filmography where you have to remind yourself it’s done by that director, because it contains none of their style. Christopher Nolan has Insomnia, a by-the-numbers, linear murder mystery. Welles has The Stranger, a remarkably straight forward movie with clear good guys and bad guys. John Carpenter and Hitchcock have a few. It could be argued George Romero has a couple, but there’s some additional context needed. Romero really had two filmographies: his Dead movies and everything else. Within the six movies of his Dead series, this one, Survival, is easily the odd duck. I could point to the barely-there theme, or the total abandonment of practical effects, or any number of other flaws, but they all trace back to one root cause. Survival feels painfully amateurish. The editing that cuts off scenes, sometimes in mid-sentence. The ill-placed humor in the final conflict. The dialogue too awkward and unbelievable to even be a product of AI. The acting that has to consist of dress rehearsal footage, because there’s no way these were the best takes. The total reliance on CGI instead of practical effects, but CGI on the kind of budget computer that ran Windows ME. The subtle but palpable theming that is a hallmark of the previous movies (even the lackluster Land Of The Dead) that is almost entirely absent until the last five minutes, where the movie starts beating the viewing in the head with a boat oar to get its point. Romero had a handle on all of these in previous works, and he knew how to paper over the flaws. Did Day Of have the strongest theming? No, but it made up for it with in depth character study and patient storytelling. Did Night Of have the best acting? No, but it made up for that with great tension and claustrophobia, and (at the time) a fresh concept. Did Diary Of have a big budget? No, but the found footage/documentary style covered that up and put a sense of urgency and immediacy in the movie. Survival has none of that. It’s a zombie movie, and a rote, bland one at that. There’s no real protagonist or antagonist. There’s no depth to any characters. There’s some clever ways to dispatch zombies, but they’re TOO clever; nobody in a life or death situation would do the things these people do. And the movie just looks cheap. Low budget is one thing, and can be used to a movie’s benefit, or at least hidden with some canny direction. Survival doesn’t have that. Romero seems to have phoned this one in, because there is nothing of him anywhere to be found here. No biting social commentary, no morality plays, no character studies, no nothing. Survival feels like an exercise in commerce and nothing more. Whether that commerce was someone trying to ride a wave but had nothing to do it with, or a tired man out of ideas scraping the bottom of the barrel to keep the lights on, I don’t know. But it is a poor way for the Dead series to conclude.