First off I'm a huge George Romero and zombie fan, and had to at least see this movie one time. The premise sounded really cool (people documenting the zombie uprising using hand held cameras), but I was worried that it was going to be disappointing because of some of the reviews I'd read. A lot of people who liked Romero's other Dead movies didn't like this movie, saying that Romero was past his prime, that the acting and dialogue were bad, that it hit you over the head with its social commentary and it was preachy, and that there was annoying music and narration over the whole movie. I'm writing this review for the people like me who are fans of Romero and zombie movies but are put off by some of the reviews, and to tell them not to worry. This is a good movie.



It's probably my third favorite after Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Land of the Dead (I liked this better than Day of the Dead). And yes it is flawed, but not as flawed as some of the reviews are saying, and I had an enjoyable time watching it. No, I'm not a Romero apologist either. Though I'm a fan of his Dead series he's made some clunkers too. I didn't really like Bruiser, for instance. I also like intelligent horror movies. I care more about telling a good story than I do about blood and guts and fast cuts.



The narration which I thought I would hate doesn't actually run over the entire movie. I thought there would be this running monologue explaining what was going on as if we couldn't just watch the movie ourselves. But it's only every once in a while and it usually moves the story forward. For example, after a sequence is done the narrator might come on and say "Over the next couple days we watched the story develop on the news...", and as she's talking it'll show news clips of how the dead are taking over. She doesn't talk over any of the action or dialogue. In fact, I actually liked the narration. I thought the documentary style was what set this movie apart from Blair Witch and Cloverfield. I also didn't think it was preachy or heavy handed either. I thought it was "just right" and it added commentary to the movie.



That said, there were a few times where the dialogue between the characters themselves got a little preachy, most noticeable in the hospital scene. And I thought sometimes the way they acted wasn't very realistic. For example, every time someone was in danger and Jason (the guy behind the camera) just stood there and kept filming. It gets explained later on that the media is distorting everything and that's why making this movie is so important to him, but still I didn't find it very realistic. Especially in the hospital scene where he's standing there waiting for his camera to recharge while he can hear his friends screaming in the background, and he's not even like "hurry!" And when they hear the first news reports at the beginning of the movie, everybody's just like "oh, shouldn't we get out of here?" If it were me I'd be glued to the TV like "NO WAY! ZOMBIES?!?! Can this be REAL?!?!?"



Also, the music is a little annoying because again it isn't very realistic. The narrator says she added music because "I am trying to scare you...so maybe you don't repeat the mistakes we made." What mistakes??? I would have been fine with music over the parts where the narrator cuts in and starts showing news clips of what's going on in the rest of the world, but it makes no sense to add music to the scenes where people are dying.



Those are my only problems with the movie. And it may seem like a lot, but I thought the movie really took off in the second half and I was sitting on the edge of my seat and really getting into the story. I thought the movie was flawed and could have been a 5 star movie with some polishing, but on the whole I enjoyed it. There's voice cameos by Stephen King, Guillermo Del Toro, Simon Pegg, and Quentin Tarantino. There's references to Romero's earlier Dead movies. At one point in the movie, the characters are actually listening to the one of the news broadcasts from Night of the Living Dead. There's an intelligent commentary, some good looking zombies, it has elements from Romero's world like a gang of looters and corrupt officials, and this is the first Romero zombie movie where the characters are actually out in the open the entire movie, not boxed up somewhere with the zombies outside trying to get in.