Contains
mild spoilers.
If there's one word
that comes to mind watching The Ford brother's The Dead, it's bleak. Filmed in
Burkina Faso, the directors paint a beautiful rich African canvas, full of dry
tropical savannah and deep blue Pacific water, and contrast this with a foreground
full of unremitting death and despair. There is no time to stop and admire the
view as from start to finish The Dead offers a world where there is no respite,
no hope and death is an inevitability.
The lone survivor of
the last ill fated evacuation-flight, engineer Lt. Brian Murphy played by Rob
Freeman finds himself stranded with few supplies on the coast of a West African
overrun by the living dead. With no clear plan his only focus is to survive
long enough to be reunited with his wife and daughter back home. It's focused
on this task and travelling away from the coast in a ruined car he manages to
fix up that he runs into Sgt. Daniel Dembele (Prince David Oseia) who comes to
his rescue after he gets himself into a bit of a pickle.
Discovering that
like him, Dembele is focused on reunited with his child, in this case his son,
and realising that there is to be no quick escape from the country, the
disparate pair agree to share the hundred mile journey north where they believe
some safety and answers can be found. So what begins is harrowing tiring
journey of survival and the focus of the film.
The zombies of The
Dead follow the Romero tradition with the Ford brothers playing very safely
with established zombie rules and canon. They're slow shambling mindless monsters motivated by the hunger for
living flesh. If anything they're even slower than those in Romero's Dead
trilogy but what danger they lose from this speed is more than made up for in
their persistence and numbers. Now I've
not been to West Africa but I imagine a vastness and emptiness pocketed
sporadically with people and villages, I imagine great expanses of land devoid
of life and being able to travel for days without seeing another soul. However
in The Dead whether resting on a beach or driving through scrub land, whether
stumbling without water across the dessert or climbing over deadly rocky peaks,
Murphy and Dembele can't move more than five yards without being set upon by
the ever abundant undead horde.
It's this constant
threat that maintains the feeling of despair felt throughout the film. There is
never respite, never a break from surviving; your car breaks down? You have
minutes, literally minutes before you need to be on your way again or you'll face
being overrun. The heroes must never pause to take stock, never stop moving,
and never even for a moment let their guard down. Survival zombie films
constantly play with the notion of an ever present threat but rarely have I
seen a film with so little pacing changes. The Dead manages only two states,
set-upon and nearly set-upon and there is never a moment on their drive where a
zombie isn't in view and a threat. Ok, there is a scene where the pair take a
small rest in guarded village but even that is interrupted by the notion the
safety is transient and illusionary and will not last .
For a world facing
true global apocalypse, and a film about survival, Murphy and Dembele are only
ever really allowed to deal with the threat of the zombies. Whilst introducing
issues of food, water and shelter the Ford brothers only ever really skirt around
these other facets of surviving in an apocalyptic world. This was a missed
opportunity and was a direct consequence of a narrative that never broke from
it's formula of an ever-constant threat and ever-populous environment. From this, the film almost feels like a
single constant scene and can be a tad weary and exhausting to watch.
From start to finish
the zombies despite their pace seem genuinely brutal and menacing. Driven by
insatiable hunger their approach is always tense and dramatic, and when they do
get to their target the special effects are vicious and horrifying with zombies
ripping and tearing at flesh in an authentic and never over the top way. The
eating scenes are genuinely unpleasant and the constant backdrop of severed
limbs, blood and disembowelled intestines is not for the squeamish but never
feel out of place or forced. With the limited budget and filming difficulties
mentioned in interview in the few scant extras the Blu-ray has, kudos must go
to the Ford brothers for managing to produce a coherent beautifully crafted
movie that feels authentic throughout.
Shot with beauty and
style against a gorgeous and glorious African backdrop The Dead captures the
hot African pace of life and a world under constant threat. Yet it's the pacing
of the threat that has produced a film that can be exhausting to watch and at
times dare say a little boring.
Something genuinely new and refreshing, and filmed with a beauty and style The
Dead is a good zombie film and almost a great one. A missed opportunity, 6/10.
Steven@WTD.
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