I used to think of George Romero's The Crazies as having the misfortune of existing in the shadows of his two greatest living dead films (neither if which, strictly speaking, are science fiction), Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, as it was released in the time between them. That is, of course, true, but I think there is more to its lack of popularity than its being a non-zombie Romero movie. Each of Romero's living dead installments follows one basic pattern: humans fighting amongst each other while the invading force is, often literally, right outside the door. The Crazies pretty much follows the same template, but there is one important difference: the invading force is microscopic. This is more significant than you might think. Without a visible, on-screen antagonist, we are forced to confront the human characters more directly. We have nothing to distract us from their faults, from their bickering, or from their decisions.

This movie opens with a young boy semi-playfully tormenting his sister at night. Suddenly a madman is burning down their house, and the boy stops his game in order to protect his sister. Their parents have already been killed. The madman, it turns out, is one of the town's first residents to be infected by the Trixie virus, a biological weapon that somehow made its way from the military's hands into the water supply of Evans City, Pennsylvania. It is, of course, "highly contagious," and if it doesn't kill those that it infects, it turns them impossibly crazy (the latter is most often the case). Before they know it, the town is under martial law, and the military, decked out in white hazmat suits complete with ominous-looking gasmasks, is wrangling the residents so as to prevent the virus from spreading outside the town. As you might guess, here is where the true conflict begins. For the rest of the movie, the narrative switches back and forth between a small band of residents and the heads of the military operation.

It is a fight between the military, which is doing what it sees is its only option, and the townspeople, who feel that their rights are being blatantly violated. The wonderful thing about this film is that neither side is given a moral edge over the other because in the end, they're both right. It is the militarys only option, but the townspeople's rights, at the same time, are being blatantly violated. It might be easy to watch the movie and view the military as the bad guy, butting in and forcing things to their own will, and that might be how the situation would be treated by most other directors, but they really are given fair treatment in The Crazies. For example, we have, among other scenes, a soldier stopping during a home invasion to give a terrified child his toy. In another invasion, a soldier gently asks a grandma to come with him (the politeness is not returned, to say the least). This is clearly not a power trip. But at the same time, you cannot blame the residents for becoming a little belligerent during these sudden forced evictions because unlike us, they don't get to see behind the masks of these things that look like modern day versions of the stormtroopers from the original Star Wars trilogy (even though this movie predates that saga).

Despite how I might have made it sound, there are bad guys in this film, but here, good or bad doesn't depend on whose side you are on. It depends on how you approach the problem. Despite the fairness with which the military is portrayed, we know we see a bad guy when one of them eats a sandwich while contemplating the very real possibility of having to nuke the town. Most of the people in the world are good, but there will always be some who are just bad, simple as that. And one scene that occurs on the brink of finding a vaccine for the virus makes it clear that the biggest enemy of all is miscommunication.

Perhaps more importantly than anything else, this movie is fun to watch. The virus-induced madness, the hazmat soldiers, and the conflict work together to bring us some great images, which are presented proudly by the film's rich colors. One of the more memorable scenes features an open-field skirmish between the "crazies" and the white-suited, gas-masked military. We get gunfire, dynamite, pitchforks, and one very domestic insurgent who calmly sweeps the grass with a broom while her friends and foes kill each other. And the editing is great, too. Throughout the film, there are little segments of quick successive cuts, usually in the form of semi-heterogeneous montages, which effectively create the very sense of panic and chaos that the characters must be feeling.

So, yes, perhaps this movie is less widely known than it should be partly because Romero's zombie films cast a very dark shadow over his other works. But the real "problem" with this movie is that it is dangerous to like. Some movies claim to force us to confront our beliefs but actually offer a distinctly unoriginal view of the world being imperfect. In The Crazies, we are forced to reexamine that view. Maybe the military is not always all that bad, even when they do things we don't like. Who really stands the moral ground: the ones who make the decision to make tough decisions, or the optimists who think everything will right itself? In the end, there is no one protagonist group. We are meant to root for everyone, here, because they are all human, and for the same reason, neither side is without its flaws. It is conflict itself that really kills us. Would we be like the child at the beginning, stopping our game to save our sibling? Or would we act more like the main characters of the film, bickering until a third of the town has turned crazy?