![]() and then it burnt through all of that narrative potential in just a few episodes, and became just TWD with different characters, but the same old locust swarm cycle. It started before the collapse, and began to tell the story of the process of collapse itself. However, I was disappointed when Fear the Walking Dead missed out on what I perceived to be a golden opportunity to tell a different kind of story, and to differentiate itself from TWD. It isn't a bad narrative choice in both of those cases (at least initially), the point was to explore how an ordinary person might react to a chaotic world where society has fallen apart, and throwing the characters into it is an effective way of emphasizing the shock of it. Both 28 days later and the Walking Dead is centered around someone who wakes up from a coma after the collapse has already happened. Ironically, most zombie movies skip past huge chunks of the actual collapse itself. Maybe something have changed after season 7 though. Now speak not good"), and at best showed promise, but was all scrapped by the next revolution of the locust swarm cycle. But no, we were normal adults a couple of years ago. We have forgotten how to talk normally for some reason, and admittedly would make a lot more worldbuilding sense decades after the collapse if we were a society that had grown up alone as children in the dump without parental guidance. It was frustrating to see its attempts at worldbuilding, and the potential to see how a new society would be built in its setting, but the worldbuilding was gimmicky at worst ( "hi, we have lived in a dump for a couple of years. This is especially apparent in the Walking Dead, where the protagonists are just thrown in an endless and predictable narrative loop Unsafe! Find safe place! Bad thing happens! Unsafe! Find safe place! Like a locust swarm. Realistically, a new status quo would be reached eventually, so the longer a zombie story goes, the more the writers tend to reach for often contrived reasons to keep the setting in perpetual collapse. Anything that doesn't hinge on the setting to be the sole driver of the plot, like a lot of zombie fiction does. Or it can look to procedural shows like detective shows, or shows like stargate SG-1 for that matter. A status quo after a post apocalypse would require worldbuilding, so good places to look for narrative inspiration would be the sci-fi and fantasy genres, where the setting is a sandbox for storytelling. I think there is great storytelling potential in a setting that deals with a status quo of a post-apocalyptic world with zombies, but the "how" of writing that is not found in the established zombie genre. ![]() So it just fills the narrative void with contrived drama. I also think this stems from how the zombie genre leans so heavily towards the collapse of society as a setting, so a lot of the time people who are great at writing zombie stories don't necessarily know how to write a new status quo. ![]() Sorry for the wall of text! I have just thought a lot about this, so when I put it in words it became. The camera Boyle used for filming wasn't particularly high-end which is a real shame - because this film with a top-range camera would've been beautiful.ĮDIT - I know they’re not zombies, I just called them zombies for the sake of simplicity! Sorry! The only thing I was left wanting with this film was a better camera quality really. It kept the pace of the film quick and created so much damn tension throughout. They sprint towards their prey and leap on them- plus the transformation from human to infected takes seconds (which is something that more zombie films should do in my opinion). Even though some of the performances weren't very good, I often overlook them because of the brilliant writing.Īlso, this film is actually scary! The zombies are terrifying. The main characters are well-rounded and we learn about them and genuinely get attached to them throughout the film's runtime (unlike the sequel). Boyle's beautiful and harrowing shots to bring this London to life are just incredible. The setting is easily one of the best of any zombie film I've seen - an abandoned, lifeless London with literally no life around at the film's start. Even though the sequel really lets this movie down (other than the legendary intro), I really believe this film is one of the best zombie films out there.
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