This is a spoiler-free review for all 12 episodes of All of Us Are Dead, premiering Friday, Jan. 28 on Netflix.
All of Us Are Dead is South Korea's latest entry into its excellent, escalating body of undead mayhem (Train to Busan, #Alive). A zombie outbreak series (mostly) set within the carnage-filled classrooms, hallways, and stairwells of a multi-storied high school, All of Us Are Dead pulls no punches and unleashes a savage and seemingly never-ending assault of fast-running zombies on an unfortunate squad of students who've managed to survive the first wave of a zompocalypse. It's clever, thrilling, and also... a bit exhausting.
Unfolding over 12 solidly packed hour-long episodes, All of Us Are Dead is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of zombie horror. Whether this production, from South Korea's JTBC Studios and Film Monster, is at all a victim of typical Netflix bloat is unknown, but it's definitely best absorbed a few episodes at a time and not in a full binge swoop. After three or four episodes, you might be like "Hell yeah, this rules!" but then around Episodes 8 and 9, there's a chance you'll feel a bit snowblind amongst all the thrashing limbs and gnashing teeth.
One of the show's inherent strengths -- which is that it takes its time moving our lead characters from one area to another (sometimes a whole episode will involve them trying to move just 50 feet) -- also leads to repetitive beats later down the road, mid-season. A ton could be trimmed from this tale, especially some of the adjunct stories that focus on other outbreak survivors outside of the school, but overall, the upsides outweigh the sluggishness.
The most exciting part of most zombie stories is the initial crushing downfall of civilization and fortunately, that's the entire focus here. Likewise, every crisis these teens face throughout this ordeal feels real, immediate, and grounded. In turn, every solution they arrive at, to get themselves out of their in-the-moment conundrum, makes sense. It all feels like these are solutions relatively smart humans could come up with, whether they're trying to escape a gymnasium equipment closet, move from room to room in the school, or simply create a small enough window to book it fast and get a running chance.
All of Us Are Dead's zombie action is never not impressive. Whether it's giant chaotic crowd shots, massive ensemble brawls, or tricky "oners," this is massively kinetic storytelling that will drain you as emotionally as it drains our heroes physically. Likewise, there are dozens of instances involving astounding body acting, with the zombies contorting in fiendish and inhuman ways reminiscent of Jennifer Carpenter's performance in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
Yoon Chan-young and Park Ji-hoo anchor this gory and dense horror-coaster, as neighbors and best friends since kindergarten Chung-san and On-jo. Chung-san like-likes On-jo, but On-jo like-likes Park Solomon's former bully Soo-hyuk (while Soo-hyuk crushes on Cho Yi-hyun's morose class president, Nam-ra). It feels silly to write it all out, since it might make the overarching stakes feel trite, but the relationships are more complex than one might assume and provide the actual lifeblood of the story, which is absolutely necessary during some of the middle chapters when bloodletting becomes a bit of a blur.
Some of the other students in the ragtag regimen of survivors may feel tacked on or short-sheeted at first, character-wise, but the series does a good job of making them all feel vital by the end. They wind up as a found family of sorts, who've seen ample atrocities, experienced enormous loss, and now feel abandoned by the world. All of Us Are Dead flounders the most when it strays away from the school, and many of the threads we follow elsewhere lead to rather flat finishes, but the high school heart of the show rarely stumbles. The series also has a rather malicious time with herd thinning, as hardly anyone is exempt from a nasty demise no matter how important you feel they are to the story.
Our perpetually cornered, trapped, and besieged heroes move from classrooms to rooftops to mountains to city streets in an attempt to find any sort of suitable sanctuary while the government decides what to do with the lost city of Hyosan. The series juggles quite a bit between the students, parents, soldiers, and cops while also threading in a bit of social commentary about the trauma created by bullying.
One of the school's bullies, a towering thug named Gwi-nam (Yoo In-soo), incessantly stalks our main characters in one of the more fatiguing elements of the series, but All of Us Are Dead still has a bit of fun playing around with the idea of half-zombies, meaning those whose natural immunity to the virus causes them to transform into something in between the living and dead. If you pace your viewing just right, and break up any potential tedium, the series becomes a unique, effective, and hyper-violent gem.
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