THE RUNNING DEAD

After making us eat zombies regularly (and the creature swarming all over the industry with The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Peninsula...), it was implausible that Netflix would transcend a genre that has increasingly hard to renew with his All Of Us Are Dead. The starting point of the plot is therefore quite conventional, with zero case, a first infection, a situation which degenerates very quickly and the formation of a group of survivors.

The new series, however, has something to satisfy fans of the zombie apocalypse with regard to the horrific and survivalist atmosphere, that is to say the heart of the story. The episodes thus offer everything one can look for in them: carnage, heartbreaking and sadistic deaths on the part of the showrunner, adrenaline rushes and obviously graphic and visceral violence assumed.

HOLD THE DOOR

But beyond butcheries and other cuttings of human meat, the series is even more playful when it sets up tense and extreme situations where the group must use everything that makes up their current environment - and in particular street furniture and school equipment - to get out of its vice. Most of the time, it's done intelligently, with plenty of staging ideas to install tension with as much inventiveness as possible, both visually and in the writing of the scenes themselves, by highlighting ever more astute and complex plans.

In the first episodes in particular, the production is quite nervous with a handheld camera, but little editing to stretch the scenes of massacres to make short sequence shots and intensify the ambient hysteria and chaos. The depiction of zombies - who are not really zombies, but just like - also works most of the time, whether in terms of sound effects with disturbing guttural roars and their joints which creak exaggeratedly, or even in terms of their contortionist gestures, the latter being part of the hyperactive zombies who act as super-predators.

Barrier gestures

TOO MANY PEOPLE TO EAT

Unfortunately, as you'd expect with 12 almost hour-long episodes, the show's plot stretches and bloats unnecessarily. The main group of survivors are trapped in a high school, but the storyline does not make the facility a unit of place. On the contrary, the episodes travel to the four corners of the city to follow a whole gallery of characters and unfold sub-plots that go in all directions and stifle the dynamics of the first episodes.

The narrative is therefore split into several pieces. While some characters are totally incidental to the script - the suicidal influencer to name but one - others could have been better exploited if they weren't superficially introduced and didn't stay offscreen for 1 or 2 episodes before the scenario finds a way to get rid of it.

High school of the dead

Halfway through, the series even struggles to focus on one action at a time. At times, the scenario presents perilous situations, but rather than maintaining the tension or increasing it crescendo, the scenes are interspersed with other scenes which concern other characters who we don't care about at the moment.

The series would therefore have really benefited from having a much less dense backdrop to have less messy writing, and from refocusing on the high school survivors and their attempt to escape to be more effective and impactful. Especially since the tone and the use of certain codes of the teen series work quite well. The scenario pulls on fairly large strings, presents a few situations that are not very believable and several stereotyped profiles, which does not prevent most of the adolescent characters from being endearing or interesting. Above all, it tells something about the fragile state of mind of youth and its generational divide with its elders, all through the codes of South Korean society.

The worst time to fall in love?

CORONAVIRUS 4.0

This multiplication of points of view and the different ramifications of the story serve above all a logic of over-explicitation of the subtexts that we usually find in zombie stories, whether it is about our own dehumanization, the self-destruction of our species or the inversion of the balance of power between dominant and dominated. To highlight these reading keys, the series dwells subtly on the why and how the first zombie appeared. The episodes thus give it a crappy origin story and move forward on the generally puzzling path of “evolved zombies”, with half-human, half-zombie characters.

It's quite easy to see in it another somewhat awkward parallel with teenagers caught between two ages, which some of the lines emphasize even more insistently. And as long as we talk about bad or crude innuendos and analogies, the allusions to the current pandemic and the comparisons that the scenario attempts were also dispensable. And this even if it helps to anchor the story a little more in our reality. Some episodes thus cite films like Last Train for Busan or Welcome to Zombieland for a meta aspect that is never really assumed.

This is called holding the leg

The series drags on, spends too much time justifying its point and gets lost when it had a concept, certainly simple and agreed, but which could be more effective and entertaining, which is generally expected of this kind of story. And as All Of Us Are Dead is a kind of winning combo (teenage series + new South Korean series + zombies), we can already ask ourselves questions about a possible season 2. Even more so if the series is a hit in the next few days.

The series has the merit of having an open end that could totally stand on its own, but which could just as well lead to a much larger universe where there would not even really be any question of zombies. For what it would have to tell, a sequel would therefore a priori be less exciting and relevant, but we must not forget that Netflix has made an Army of the Dead prequel without zombies and proves a little more every day than its subscribers are safe from nothing.

All Of Us Are Dead is available in full since this Friday, January 28 on Netflix