Zombieland Review, Week 3 of Flash Forward
10. Oct, 2009 
6 Comments
I managed to catch Zombieland the other day (last week in fact) and, despite the box office receipts and despite my personal reluctance to post yet another pan
1. Zombieland is one of those “seen the trailer, seen it all” flicks. In other words, once you’ve laughed and enjoyed the mayhem of the trailer and then said “I’d like to see that”, don’t bother.
2. The promotional campaign for this film is probably mostly at fault. Trailers and ads give you the impression that the film is supposed to be a comedic send up of the genre. Unfortunately, it only tries to be that, but isn’t.
Given the name and the focus on the theme park in the trailers, I got the distinct impression that the story was something along the lines of: Zombie Virus causes civilization to fall. Survivors are a bit wacky. One or a group of them open up a theme park where the main attraction is offing zombies in interesting and creative ways and somewhere along the line conflict enters with a quest to name/win the coveted title of Best Zombie Killer of the Year.
Now I understand that this is my personal impression from the trailers (online and in the theater), but I think it is a justified one given the tag lines and cut scenes that were chosen for that trailer.
What we got was a pastiche of what was probably three different original scripts: a pure (comedic) zombie survival flick featuring a nerd who, despite his physical limitations and phobias about everything, has managed to survive and is writing a survival guide; the zombie theme park flick I outlined above and a chase/three way romance/zombie rogues screwing each other over comedy somewhat like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but with zombies instead of scams.
Mashed and mixed together, we end up with a film that starts to go in three different directions (promisingly) and then sputters out as it can’t seem to find its true focus amongst any of the themes.
I was really looking forward to several silly rounds of one-upsmanship between Harrelson’s ‘I was born to be a zombie killer’ character and the nerd’s ‘I survive because I’m full of phobias’ character, but we got none of that.
The women never developed either and, in a very strange twist, despite the fact that they were always managing to put one over on the boys, they were the ones that had to be rescued in the end.
In summation: nice idea, poorly handled. A lot of creative energy went into different ways to kill zombies that should have gone into writing a tighter script.
I’m still very enamored of my original impression: Zombieland the theme park, with awards to Killer of the Month.
~~~
Flash Forward. My prediction came true. I forgot to remember the time slot and only accidentally tuned in during the beginning of the second half of the third episode – the interview with the Nazi war criminal.
Interesting (yawn) that the 137 seconds of blackout has (maybe) something to do with Jewish mysticism (yawn).
It only took two episodes, but obviously I’ve lost interest. I have no burning need to know who, why or what led to the flash forward incident, nor how any of the characters solve their predestination/free will issues.
BTW – missed the second episode of Stargate: Universe entirely too. Now all I’ve got waiting in the wings is ‘V’, and I have a feeling that’s going to get just as moralistically twisty-turny boring as everything else.
I say let’s go back to series that have episodes.
Damn it, that’s emphasis where NOTHING CAN CHANGE. (Italics stripped again.)
“…120 short stories in the same setting, with the same characters….”
And, specifically, to be clear, 120 stories where nothing can change.
I’m sorry, but the last four seasons of _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_ were better than any other _Star Trek_ because of the depth and complexity of the story, and the character arcs. The reason _Babylon 5_ was the best space opera ever done on tv was because it had a single story arc, with sub story arcs for each season. The reason _BSG_ was so good was because it had a story arc; everyone agrees that the stand-alone episodes forced by the network in the second half of season 3 were the weakest. Etc., etc., etc.
An anthology tv show, such as _Twilight Zone_ presents short stories. A non-anthology tv series isn’t presenting short stories: it’s presenting endless unconnected chapters of a long story that by definition can be shuffled into any order, and where it’s mandated that nothing can significantly change from one chapter to the next. That’s simply a procrustean forcing of inferior story-telling. No writer or set of writers can produce 120 short stories in the same setting, with the same characters, that have the power of either 120 original short stories, or 120 chapters of one long story.
An anthology tv serieswithdifferent characters and settings each time is something entirely different from non-serial series tv.
Steve G
I know. I said I saw the SECOND half of the episode.
Gary,
patience, please on html tagging of comments. I’ve tried a few things that have not worked. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence…
My comment on getting back to episodic TV does not necessarily apply to SG:U. So far as the deeper stories go – meh. I consider it little more than a marketing tool to enforce viewership.
Some say that flash fiction is the toughest thing to write, given the word count limitation. Others have said for a long time that short stories are difficult (to do well). I’d say the same applies to TV episodic writing vs “the serial form”. More difficult, therefore, we don’t see hardly any of it any more. Folks can’t do it (well) and the audience is steadily diminishing in intelligence.
I wonder what our “water pipes lined with lead” is going to turn out to be….
Well, turns out the Kabblah story was a fakeout. Shoulda watched the whole thing.
“BTW – missed the second episode of Stargate: Universe entirely too.”
I thought it did a good job of what it was intended to do. I won’t be missing any episodes unless there’s some dramatic drop in quality, which I don’t see any reason to anticipate. I was very pleased with the further depth of characterization revealed with just one more episode, and how the story was advanced.
“I say let’s go back to series that have episodes.”
Setting aside that I don’t understand how this applies to SGU, I’d say the one thing that has led the tv series to become the richest medium for visual drama in the past decade has been the adoption of the serial form, which allows for vastly deeper and richer plots, themes, and characterizations over 22 or 26 or 44 or 69 or whathaveyou number of 44 minute segments than stories that go for 44 minutes and hit a reset button. Every single one of the greatest tv dramas made in the last decade has been a serial, or largely one: _The Wire_, _Deadwood_, the better parts of _BSG_, _Rome_, much of _Buffy_, and so on. Longform is good. Who would argue that novels should be killed and only short stories allowed?
On the other hand, so far as I’ve read, SGU *isn’t* (could you perhaps *please* get around to letting us use HTML tags in comments RSN, btw?) going to be all that strictly arc-oriented, in any case.
As a final note, Robert Carlyle is proving to be exactly as good an actor as anyone familiar with his work knows him to be.