hockler-18080

I'm a huge fan of the zombie genre, and I think if you do it right it still hasn't been beaten to death yet. There's still life left in the undead, as far as I'm concerned. But when it's good it's awesome, like the first few seasons of The Walking Dead, and when it's bad it's bloody awful.

The creators of this show have a good cast, and the acting is perfectly fine for a show of this pedigree. Cinematography is great. Suspense-building for the jump-scares that may or may not come are overused, but usually well executed.

But as with most "bad" zombie shows, the problem lies with the scripts -- usually written by Hollywood types who, between tokes of weed, just simply suck at anticipating what human beings actually do in a crisis as they write. They don't know anything about psychology, they don't know anything about guns, they don't know anything about the military -- they just want to make a show that manipulates emotions, often on the level of your average CW programming.

I was only able to watch the first three episodes, and once I saw that last one go full-on Lord of the Flies, I knew I couldn't continue. It was a stunningly stupid premise for how people (in this case children) would behave six weeks into a disaster.

I don't want to include any spoilers, but the show is fraught with unrealistic dialog, reactions, thinking, planning, etc., and it was just painful to watch. The whole point of a survival drama is to examine how people in the modern world adapt to a crisis that takes the modern world away from them. These showrunners did a terrible job at that most important piece of this kind of storytelling.

I want to echo the sentiment of a handful of reviewers here that this project gets respect for flash, but little for substance. By my episode 4 I had already come to the conclusion that this was just a modernized Heavy Metal, and then come to find out in the trivia section later that that's just exactly how this project was initially envisioned -- Heavy Metal 2.

The problem is, in 1981, using animation to portray adult gore and sex was truly revolutionary. It was ground-breaking at a commercial scale, as only niche/basement shops were even trying it. But now you have to buy special software to keep that sort of content from literally falling out of the internet onto your screens. The plots are just as uber-simple and shallow, lean just as too far on gore and sex than is needed to tell a story, and any Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode can hold it's own to any of these stories concept wise.

It's great to see what animation teams and studios can do without Avatar budgets, don't get me wrong -- I'm happy to see the art form get a spotlight. But the producers forgot what decade they were in.

This movie is stunningly, unimaginably, terrible. If the characters in this movie were Westerners, staring in an American sitcom, in 1995, the show would be cancelled by 1996. This is a poor-man's, Chinese version of Friends, and yet not nearly as nuanced, well-written, or as clever as that show, twenty years later, by a long shot. This script is what you'd get if you paired the concept of Friends with the writers of every effing show on the CW for the last twenty years. And it's not even that good. It's so stunningly two-dimensionally shallow, vapid and sociopathic, that even though I've tried to watch this piece of garbage three times now (so I can understand what all the hooplah is about) that I haven't gotten past the first thirty minutes once. This movie is obviously, OBVIOUSLY a financial pander to China, and a money-making attempt to get picked to be one of the 35 films China allows into its country every year. This movie is exclusively, entirely, flawlessly, worthlessly, terribly, humiliatingly, a brazen cash-grab by its producers. Please join me telling them all to go eff themselves.

Here's what you need to know about modern show-running.... If, in the first five minutes of a story, you're introduced to your two main (important) characters, and they are both obviously played by actors who got their jobs because they were underwear models two years earlier, then you already know that what you're about to see is a ridiculous, uninspired, corporate cash-grab. (See everything EVER produced on the CW, like, EVAAAAR). I know EXACTLY how this "movie" came into being a top-billed, teased, promoted, and aggressively pushed piece of "entertainment" on Netflix. It went like this: Some Gen-Z marketing-type-interns at Netflix "ran the numbers," and those numbers were something they were DESPERATE to report to their Millenial bosses, because it's so "cool" - namely that 40 percent of Americans LOVE post-apocalyptic dramas, and if you just make one, no matter how bad, it's a slam-dunk. And I'm pretty sure that's literally ALL they brought to their pitch meeting. And THEN, someone at Millenial-level middle-management went to their Gen-X bosses, and explained exactly why THEIR now-complete sociopathic skepticism of the human race is completely deserved, and that this story concept is GREAT, and we absolutely have an opportunity here to make a buck off it. Because that's all they're paid to do.

Guys, this movie is a total, complete, utter, ****-show. I'm guessing its budget is about the same as a single episode of Sense8, and has about 1% of the inspiration, story-telling, continuity, and -- here's the real kick-in-the-chops - realism. It's just another incongruous script that doesn't have ANY characters behaving realistically, honestly, consistently, or in any way that remotely builds empathy with them. It's stunningly weak, and I'm literally embarrassed that Forest Whitaker read this script and thought it was a good idea (totally love him). I give it two stars only because whoever the underpaid and underappreciated people were who were behind the root cinematography - they had their moments of total respectability (it was not a terrible LOOKING film). But that's it. To everyone else behind this travesty, you should be ashamed of yourselves. I want my two hours back.

Here's what you need to know about modern show-running.... If, in the first five minutes of a story, you're introduced to your two main (important) characters, and they are both obviously played by actors who got their jobs because they were underwear models two years earlier, then you already know that what you're about to see is a ridiculous, uninspired, corporate cash-grab. (See everything EVER produced on the CW, like, EVAAAAR). I know EXACTLY how this "movie" came into being a top-billed, teased, promoted, and aggressively pushed piece of "entertainment" on Netflix. It went like this: Some Gen-Z marketing-type-interns at Netflix "ran the numbers," and those numbers were something they were DESPERATE to report to their Millenial bosses, because it's so "cool" - namely that 40 percent of Americans LOVE post-apocalyptic dramas, and if you just make one, no matter how bad, it's a slam-dunk. And I'm pretty sure that's literally ALL they brought to their pitch meeting. And THEN, someone at Millenial-level middle-management went to their Gen-X bosses, and explained exactly why THEIR now-complete sociopathic skepticism of the human race is completely deserved, and that this story concept is GREAT, and we absolutely have an opportunity here to make a buck off it. Because that's all they're paid to do.

Guys, this movie is a total, complete, utter, ****-show. I'm guessing its budget is about the same as a single episode of Sense8, and has about 1% of the inspiration, story-telling, continuity, and -- here's the real kick-in-the-chops - realism. It's just another incongruous script that doesn't have ANY characters behaving realistically, honestly, consistently, or in any way that remotely builds empathy with them. It's stunningly weak, and I'm literally embarrassed that Forest Whitaker read this script and thought it was a good idea (totally love him). I give it two stars only because whoever the underpaid and underappreciated people were who were behind the root cinematography - they had their moments of total respectability (it was not a terrible LOOKING film). But that's it. To everyone else behind this travesty, you should be ashamed of yourselves. I want my two hours back.