DMZ

This is not a 1 score, neither is it a 10 score. Its just a lazy, badly put together, forgetable trudge through a DMZ that is unrecognizable from the original comic. I gave up after the 2nd episode because I had absolutely no interest in seeing anymore or it.

If you're a purist of the comic, this is definitely not for you. If you separate it from that, it's still not that great of a show. No particular actor or actress steps out to steal the spotlight. The directing of the first episode is horrible and jumps around too much to allow the viewer to understand what is happening. It gets marginally.better but it's been done before and done better.

The acting is OK. No stand-out performances, but none too terrible. The twists and character arcs are predictable.

Instead of focusing on the effects of civil war, it's a run-of-the-mill turf war that borders on racist stereotypes of gang communities. There's an election too, although the candidates are all violent kingpins preaching about unity while murdering dissidents, so it's difficult to really care.

Tonally it's a mess. In one scene the DMZ is portrayed as ruins torn apart by a decade of war, and in a subsequent scene you have vivid yellow colour grading and twenty-somethings barbecuing and drinking out of mason jars like it's Glastonbury festival. Everyone is clean, well-dressed, and happy. I really admire the costume design, but it's more suited to a catwalk than a war zone.

There's a very tone-deaf moment early on where Ortega is smiling in a happy hipster marketplace, chuckling over "people at their worst" - as if civil war isn't so bad as long as you can drink home brew at the vintage fair. Ten seconds later we're in a clinic watching a teen cough blood.

The cinematography is all over the place. A particularly heavy-handed shot is filmed upside down, because "Ortega's world has been turned upside down" and the only way to show this was by making viewers stand on their heads. The words "I don't want to be reminded" are scribbled on the wall of her old apartment building. My, how symbolic. Several close-up shots of a character's hands, and dialogue is repeated just in case you didn't realise it was important the first three times.

There's an almost comical over-reliance on lens flares, shaky-cam, and focus pulls. Action scenes are a blurry, jumpy mess of dutch angles. Each line of dialogue has its own shot, sometimes two. There's never more than a few seconds to focus on a character's emotions or reactions before cutting away.

And of course, there are plenty of inaccuracies and continuity errors. Little things like wounds requiring major surgery are miraculously healed with just some stitches and kind words. Dates on ID badges, Ortega's son's height chart, in dialogue and in promotional material don't quite add up. A gubernatorial election is held, glossing over issues like which federal union the governor belongs to. It just feels lazy.

Because, you know, there's a civil war. Apparently that's supposed to affect things.

The premise of this is odd to say the least: there is a second civil war going on in the US, which would be a big deal worthy of a true blockbuster series, but the show spends roughly 15 seconds talking about it, and then we're just stuck following inconsequential people the rest of the way. Mostly a mother looking for her long-lost son, or petty gang bosses holding small-time political rallies. It's such a weird waste of a potentially phenomenal backdrop.

What made the graphic novel so successful, albeit uneven, was the ambitious scope of the story, detailing the effects of the war on so many people stuck in the DMZ, struggling each day to survive. Whereas here it barely registers as a conflict. Probably as a way to save money, but then why take on such a grandiose source material, if you're just going to keep a few characters and a minor fraction of the plot? Parks are a little less tidy and here and there there's a burnt vehicle, but mostly Manhattan seems unaffected by a supposedly brutal war. People are living a normal life, with electricity, running water and block parties with music and street food. It's as ridiculous as it is pointless.

There has been a second American Civil War and Manhattan is declared a demilitarized zone. Alma Ortego (Rosario Dawson) is a medic desperately searching for her missing son. She gets into the crosshairs of warlord Parco Delgado (Benjamin Bratt).

The pilot holds some intrigue as it reveals this world. I was hoping for more but it still promises certain things. When she escapes into the DMZ, the pursuing soldiers claim that she wouldn't survive long. It suggests a scary dystopian world of unimaginable horrors. What it turns out to be is a mix of The Warriors and Gotham without Batman. Episode three ends with the comic book charge by two sides in a melee. It's all very poor comic book and it does not surprise me to find that this is based on a comic book series. This is no Escape from New York. This show has a promising start and then it evaporates. I can't even finish the fourth episode.