Day of the Dead

Saw Day of the Dead, another installment in Romero's zombie epic. It focused on an outpost of (possibly) the last humans in existence. There's a group of increasingly crazy army dudes, a team of earnest but effeminate scientists, and a few techs. The film follows the last living female, a scientist, who is apparently holding the whole thing together by much shouting and generous application of drugs. The film is fairly grim and nasty.

I believe society is a bit more genial than this film makes it out to be. For example, at one point, the crazy head-army-dude commands one of his underlings to shoot the female protagonist. Said underling is hesitant to do this, so the head-army-guy motivates him by pointing a gun at the underling. This is stereotypical villain behavior. I can't believe he could do this without some seriously mutinous mutterings following. I think in real life, this would have prompted a conspiracy to quietly drug his coffee and shoot his crazy ass. As I've said before, the zombie genre is seriously in love with guns and paranoia. It's a refreshing change of pace from the usual pablum of peace and tolerance, but I frankly prefer the myth of the peaceful community to the myth of the rugged individual. To each their own.

The film is mostly just grim, though. At one point the protagonist has a discussion with an amiable helicopter pilot. He is trying to convince her to give up this crazy "cure" business and just accept that society has ended. He makes a compelling point, but it is a nihilistic, hopeless one. He equates all of the useless records sitting in databases in their bunker with the fruits of civilization. This dismissive and defeatist tone rubs me wrong. When he claims they should start over, raising a family on an island somewhere, I grumpily note that with only one women around, they'll be looking at a long line of aggressive inbreeding. They might know this, of course, if they had only read the information in their databases.

As usual for a zombie film, the survivors ultimately eek out a happy ending, but only just and it's not so much hopeful as just comfortable for now. A nihilistic film, it soft-peddles its despair, making its grim conclusions seem palatable and even sophisticated. Not for me.