Survival of the Dead (2009) - 3.5/4

Throughout Romero's oeuvre, there have been two persistant themes. One is generational conflict and the other is the need for cooperation. In the Dead movies, it is cooperation that has been especially emphasized. I argued elsewhere(1) that one of Romero's major contributions to cinema is his expert and highly-realistic depictions of arguments. There are arguments in so many of his films because so few characters in his films are able to cooperate. In Night of the Living Dead, Ben and Cooper, the two alpha males, won't cooperate. In The Crazies, the townsfolk, the military, and the scientists all have difficulties cooperating with each other. It's perhaps most pronounced in Day of the Dead, where the soldiers and the scientists rarely cease yelling at one another. In Romero's films, only those capable of cooperation stand a chance at survival. Hence the few survivors of Day of the Dead. The zombies are a frightening and offensive contrast to bickering humans. However stupid, the zombies all share a single goal: eating living humans. They never interfere with one another. Humans, presumably, have a shared goal of survival; but, as is Romero's point, it never goes down that way.

Survival of the Dead is in the tradition of Romero's previous invectives against non-cooperation. The story concerns a small island where two Irish families, the Muldoons and the O'Flynns, have lived side-by-side, with a history of contention, for a good many generations. Six days after the zombie infection begins, O'Flynn has taken to shooting all zombies in the head and Muldoon has taken to preserving them in the hopes of finding a cure. Outnumbered and banished from the island, O'Flynn advertises the island as a safe-haven via the internet. The ad catches the attention of a small group of soldiers, with whom O'Flynn returns to the island to destroy both zombies and Muldoons.

There are a lot of ideas going around in Survival. One gets the feeling that Romero brainstormed and threw everything that interested him, concerned him, had him thinking into the soup without much concern for how readily they can be resolved. To beat the metaphor, it's a delicious if decadent soup. The visual and dialogue ideas are fun. The thematic ideas are interesting if at times a little confused. Some are followed through; some aren't; and many conflict.

For one, there's the issue of sentimentality. All throughout Romero's Dead films, the question has been lurking: Could you kill your friends or family as zombies? Survival addresses the question more directly than Romero's previous pictures. The first scene of the film is of Sargeant Crocket (Alan van Sprang) trying to make a superior officer 'mercy kill' a zombified soldier. The officer's inability to do so sends him directly into the clutches of a zombie, while Crocket coolly dispatches all the zombies. Yet, a little later Crocket and his team encounter a group of men who have placed several living zombie heads on sticks. Not only is Crocket apalled at the cruel treatment of the zombies, but Romero makes all the zombie heads African-American and the perpetrators white rednecks. Although it's possible Romero only wanted to make these men sufficiently unsympathetic for us to not mind if Crocket kills them all, it also seems that Romero is stipulating a racist element to the mistreatment of the living dead. So sentimentality toward the living dead seems to be a bad thing, yet mistreating them is also depicted as morally depraved.

This confusion extends to the conflict between O'Flynn and Muldoon. The first we see of O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh), he is demanding the zombified children of a Muldoon family be killed. When the mother refuses, she, a living woman, is killed by his men. O'Flynn thus appears highly misguided, if not an outright villain. But it's O'Flynn who represents anti-sentimentality. Muldoon, on the other hand, starts out very sentimental. He doesn't want a single zombie to be killed because they may just be curable. His position appears, initially, reasonable and noble, if somewhat too soft-hearted (the zombies are, after all, trying to eat everyone living). However, the more we get to know O'Flynn, the more likable he becomes. His strength, surety and wit make him an extremely sympathetic character, despite his heartless approach. Muldoon, on the other hand, comes across as inconsistant, aggressive, and frankly perverse. His home is filled with portraits of family members taken after death along with, most prominantly, a gun-toting self-portrait. He loves dead things just a little too much. Once the film is over, it's still not clear how Romero feels about sentimentality. He seems to admire the practicality in Muldoon's position, but not the sentimental motivation or the necrophiliac personality. Muldoon is willing to kill living outsiders, but not the dead; his perversion tends toward a necropolis. O'Flynn, however, seems a bit too cold, even eager, about killing the zombies. The point, again, is cooperation. Both Muldoon and O'Flynn take extreme positions. There's no reason why some zombies can't be killed and some kept in hopes of a cure. The inability of the two island patriarchs to compromise and work together is what brings ruin to the island.

Patriarchy is another part of the problem. It's the problem of generational conflicts Romero has been emphasizing since Jack's Wife (1972) and Martin (1977), if not Night of the Living Dead (1968). O'Flynn and Muldoon each occupy another age, another way of doing things, that involves tribalism and conflict. The younger characters, such as the soldiers and O'Flynn's daughter, albeit rather mercenary in character, are able to cooperate and reach agreements. Even Crocker, the team leader, functions more like the leader of a democracy than a chieftain. Zombies, Romero has explicitly stated, are a previous generation rising to destroy the current one. Survival as a whole depicts the disorders of older generations destroying the budding one. Muldoon's major perversion is his obsession with past generations. O'Flynn, at least, is a progressive, but still a tribal leader. He is viewed almost as Ulysses, the aged patriarch who returns home to take the throne and finds his once-beautiful land in a fallen state, an apocalyptic world in decay. The ulyssean solution to retake the throne and re-establish his patriarchal authority is, for Romero, no solution at all. The ability to get away from patriarchy and its tribalism, to cooperate, is the only salvation for the newer generations, and indeed for the few survivors of Survival.

One interesting feature of Survival is the dialogue. Or rather the whole approach to the narrative, in which the dialogue falls, that could best be characterized as 'coolness.' That's polite for 'cliche.' Ready-to-hand coolness is usually cliche, because coolness is created on screen before it is instantiated in life (2); it involves a considerable degree of contrivance. The dialogue and mannerisms in Survival seem so calculated for coolness, particularly amongst O'Flynn and the soldiers, that it reaches a new level--that other area of linguistic contrivance--poetry. Perhaps my favourite exchange occurs when we see a hauntingly beautiful zombie (Kathleen Munroe) ride by on a horse, the Boy (Devon Bostick) exclaims, "She's beautiful!", Crocket responds, "She's dead," and O'Flynn concludes, "She's my daughter." Elegant tricolons don't occur so readily in real life, but it sure makes a beautiful rhetorical stroke on the aural canvas. Similarly, the first we see of the character Tomboy (Athena Karkanis) is mid-masturbation in public. However liberated and coarse she's supposed to be, no woman is going to do that. It's utterly contrived, but in the overall tone and cool vibe of the film it's another stroke of poetry. Such contrivances can be annoying, as it is evidently manipulative; but at this extremity and with this mastery, it's pure poetry. The highly cinematic dialogue and mannerisms of these characters is something to be savoured.

Perhaps it's due to this cool and cinematic approach that Survival has another peculiar feature: Whatever is out of frame in Survival is usually invisible to anyone in-frame. However sharp Crocket's senses, he is totally unaware of a zombie right beside him until O'Flynn kills it. This move happens again and again. Anything could be occuring right out of frame and we don't know until a character reacts or it is brought into frame somehow. Survival is as far from the stark realism of Night of the Living Dead as the Dead series has gotten. Romero has dashed headlong into a brazen popular expressionism. It will work for some viewers and it won't work for others; for this viewer, it proved a very charming development.

Survival also boasts some of the finest performances Romero's ever gotten in one of the Dead films. While Romero has gotten good performances in non-zombie films like Martin (John Amplas) and The Dark Half (Timothy Hutton), his Dead films tend to have weak performances, with Day of the Dead containing the worst. Kenneth Welsh gives an excellent and energizing performance as the impish tough-guy O'Flynn. Welsh's quick way with words, charm, sly looks, and deceptively hobbled walk communicate a good deal about the character. The other truly outstanding performance comes from Athena Karkanis. While the other actors in the film tend to embody their characters a little too hammily, everything Karkanis says and does seems utterly natural, despite its poetic contrivance. She moves through the picture like a sexy, female David Hemmings.

So that's Survival of the Dead, a hodgepodge of Romero's late-in-life experiments with ideas and styles both old and new. For any who think Romero has long been over the hill, perhaps the final image and words of the film will draw a cynical nod. For myself, it drew an appreciative smile: Romero's creativity is alive and well, and Survival of the Dead may just be the most lyrical zombie film ever made.
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(1) - I argued in my out-of-date essay, "What's So Great About George Romero?", that the essence of Romero's films is in the arguments amongst the characters. At the time the essay was written, I hadn't seen all of Romero's films. There is much wrong with the essay, but the claim that conflict is essential to Romero's oeuvre remains, I think, a valid one.

(2) - "The Film, the World, and the Fantasy"