- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 2010 -
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Horror
- Director:
- Best Performances:
- None
- Premiss:
- Police officer leads a group of survivors in a world overrun by zombies.
- Themes:
- Personal change
- Self-expression
- Political Correctness
- White supremacy
- Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Unknown
- Review Format:
- DVD
Plus ça change...
George Romero and Michael Crichton now have a lot to answer for in this rather predictable retread of their work which does nothing to advance the horror or science-fiction forms.
The usual White anxieties about a culture in decline are evident here. The failure of their economic system to produce benefits for Whites; widespread pollution; political decline; alcoholism; drug addiction; suicide; and, generally-mindless behavior. Typically for such a self-destructive culture, the destruction here is causeless rather than self-induced: A social dishonesty that infuses this weak drama preventing it from being the social commentary science-fiction usually is; leaving it with nothing else to be.
Rather than talk about the world that is, Whites typically talk about what the world should be; ie, Political Correctness - leaving this drama to engage in sterile debates about whether people should be killed before they become zombies, rather than later. Rather than being a disquisition on the incompatibility of Ethics and Politics, this accepts the inability of the characters to do this very thing - equal to the dramatists inability to do the same and avoid the usual Hollywood-style survivalist clichés about Whites trying to continue doing what they did before the world changed, despite the profound changes wrought. A good reading of any John Wyndham novel would suggest many fruitful dramaturgical alleyways that this could have gone down, along with the many aspects of human nature that could have been explored, rather better than is apparent in this morbid soap opera.
By its focus on Caucasian actors, this series implies Whites would always try to re-assert their dominance over any world that remained after the collapse, not of the whole world - as stated here - about which Whites care little), but of the Western world - the only world shown. The drama follows this political worldview; making it hard to see the humanity of lonely Whites obsessing about how depressed they are as a result of a disease that has dehumanized most of the US population. Non-Whites’ thoughts and feelings are rarely explored despite the centrality of the issue of Common Humanity to any end-of-the-world drama. This is dishonest drama that is as anti-human as the zombies depicted in not attempt to show the new global situation nor the acceptance, or otherwise, of it.
Ultimately, this series claims Whites will renounce their self-destructive ways in favor of working together to defeat the common enemy (zombies) - when Whites have never done this before in all of human history. The opportunity to show the reality of White culture is, therefore, soundly missed in favor of wishful-thinking. As always with White drama (as with their culture) the Personal is Political, without a smidgen of dramatic analysis of the violence this produces: Political relations diminished by rage; personal relations dehumanized by politics.
The characters are largely-undifferentiated, despite the many ethnicities among the actors: They are little better than zombies they regularly tangle with. This is exacerbated by the CGI-plotting favoring the special effects; leaving us with little more than a long-drawn-out sequence of mayhem with increasingly-numbing effect. Along with the contrived, suspenseless & tensionless plotting, this makes any true empathy for any of the characters impossible - along with their plight.
See also: “The Walking Dead” Doesn’t Make Any Damn Sense
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