DMZ

Future dystopia, action, Rosario Dawson - what is not to like? A broken post-war place where everybody is cheery, clean, well dressed and well fed. The camera work is sunny and bright, wardrobe colourful. No broken people. The action involves sitting around talking, moves on to some discussion and finishes with some dialogue. Dawson is given a hopeless script and does as well as anyone could.

After seeing 25% of the series I realized there's better shows on the many watch lists of the multiple streaming services that I use. If I keep adding to those lists I'll probably never be able to get through half the content! I found nothing about episode 1 to make me want to watch episodes 2, 3 or 4. And because of that fans of this show are likely to label me, or anyone else for that matter, who rated DMZ below a 6 as a hater. I don't hate the series, it's just not worth my time. Just goes to show you how feeble minded telivision can make the masses.

I barely made it through the first episode.

My opinion is that it's not gritty enough for the setting that it proposes and story isn't very compelling. I had higher hopes for an HBO production. They should have put the money for this into more seasons of Raised by Wolves. :P.

The characters are so cringeworthy with their decisions and choices and just general demeanor. The story crawls at a snails pace and is filled with SO MUCH melodrama. Most of it isn't earned or built up to begin with to leave any impact. The editing and direction makes me want to vomit, there are so many cuts in a scene...cut to face, cut to other face, cut to handshake, cut to face again, cut to other face in like 10 seconds...It's extremely annoying. There is one big action scene in the 3rd episode that could have actually been cool, all the elements were there to make it cool, but you definitely could tell the person never shot action before and it was LAME. I'm being generous with a 5 because the actors all do fine work and are really giving it a 100% effort, the set pieces and world building were pretty cool as well. Disappointing.

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.