In his review of The Crazies, Roger Ebert says it’s hard for him to get up for zombie movies these days: “The genre has exhausted its interest for me.” His review’s got less to do with how good or bad a movie The Crazies is and more to do with its zombie-conventionality (clearly-not-an-actual-word). The square jawed yokel hero. The family and friends who’ve gone flesh-hungry. The spouse or child who’s fighting the infection from the teeth-marked wound. Though it works for me, solidly-made isn’t good enough for Ebert re: zombie movies anymore. I can see where he’s coming from. After all, dude’s got a couple years on me. He wrote a review of Night of the Living Dead upon its theatrical release back in 1967.
At first glance, AMC’s new series The Walking Dead shouldn’t do anything for Roger, too. The characters are people we’ve seen before. In fact, the Darabont do-gooder (think the corn-fed protagonists of The Mist, Shawshank, and The Green Mile) is an almost too-perfect zombie archetype. Here, our hero is Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Grimes. He’s square-shouldered enough to have one-punch knockout power, but pure enough that he’s not used to using it. In the second episode, he stretches his hand to shake off the pain after flooring some guy. Thematically, too, The Walking Dead does not seem, two episodes in, to be aiming for complex moral drama. In episode 2, there’s a rather thick exchange between a racist Merle Dixon and a black man named… ahem… T-Dogg. “Our kind don’t mix,” Merle says before putting his gun in T-Dogg’s face. To this, Rick Grimes retorts, “We have to work together.” Simple, but perhaps even more simple than its predecessors. Dawn of the Dead, for instance, was a novel take on consumerism, mindless zombies as mindless shoppers. 28 Days Later was steeped in post 9-11 paranoia. Night of the Living Dead, which came out at the height of the American civil rights movement, had a strong black lead who took it upon himself to slap some sense into his senseless white colleagues (oh, and that bleak, bleak ending!!). Granted, Robert Kirkland, the author of the comic-book source material, sometimes takes thematic u-turns. I remember reading his Invincible when it went from quaint teenage superhero tale to a darker Oedipal story that recalled Alan Moore’s Miracleman.
Don’t get me wrong: two episodes in, I am enjoying and I’m excited. I’m excited about the measured pace and the promised depth of the show’s world. Episode 1 ends with an overhead shot of a downtown Atlanta street. It pans up, the clumsy, mindless walkers getting smaller and smaller, more and more dots filling the screen. Grimes is trapped in an army tank in a big city completely infested. It’s a deliberate pan and there’s a sense of scope. This is not a small story and it’s, hopefully, not going to be a short one. The second episode opens with the shot coming back down, re-entering the tank and the center of the action. The show takes the time to retrace, exactly, it’s steps. Unlike a 2 hour movie, it has the opportunity to meander a bit, stay a bit longer in interesting scenarios i.e. guy trapped in tank.
These aren’t the fast zombies from 28 Days Later. Walking, not running, dead. And I hope the show keeps the same pace. At the beginning of the first episode, Grimes talks about his wife Laurie: “She said, ‘sometimes I wonder if you care about us at all. She said that in front of our son.” He’s shocked by her continued unhappiness and her cruelty. Later, after he’s awoken from a coma to find his town zombie-infested, he believes his wife and son still alive because the photos are gone from the walls of his abandoned house. She’s taken them with her. We go 40-minutes without seeing her yet we get a pretty vivid (though not overly-complex) picture of her. The show format can afford to parse it out, to be slow about things, to peel layers. There’s punch when we finally see her on-screen in the embrace of Grimes’s best friend.
But more than spending some nice quality time with the characters, I’m excited about spending some quality time in this world. To live in it, not just visit. Towards the end of the second episode, Grimes and Glenn rub zombie guts on themselves (interesting reverse-harvesting of zombie intestines and gore). They disguise themselves in the smell and they walk the zombie-walk towards a construction site for some working trucks. The skies grow overcast. Thunder peppers the soundtrack minutes before the rain actually falls and moves the plot. The weather gets to change gradually in this world, sort of like it does in real life. George Romero tried to build a universe out of his Living Dead series, but there was just too much time in between the films and, frankly, his skills have diminished with age. And there’s too much time between the 28-series films as well. Actually, I’m not just excited about walking around in this world. I’m excited about strolling and even stopping to take in the not-so-fresh-more-rank air.
