DMZ releases on HBO Max on March 17, 2022.
Based on the 2005 Vertigo comic by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli, DMZ spans four hours and achieves little of note. The four-part series is set in the near future after a new American civil war tears the country apart, leaving an autonomous demilitarized zone (or DMZ) in Manhattan. Amidst growing tensions, a medic from outside this zone, Alma Ortega (Rosario Dawson), searches for her son and gets roped up in local power plays for territorial control. While this premise oozes potential, it’s stifled both by its incoherent politics and its plodding approach to its characters, which makes even its most powerful and charismatic performers feel without purpose.
What immediately stands out about DMZ is how at odds with its own premise it actually feels. Its dialogue hints heavily at conflict and pandemonium (especially on the DMZ’s borders), but its approach to these ideas is blinkered, with explanations that depend heavily on dialogue, given how rarely they manifest on screen. For the most part, the show rarely feels as if it’s set in an America torn apart by war, or a New York where community means survival, despite how many times different characters hint at these things.
Part of the problem stems from the pilot episode, which was directed by Ava DuVernay in early 2020. DuVernay, while stellar at crafting individual frames, sometimes suffers as a filmmaker when she’s unable to string together shots in ways that create rhythm or meaning. In films like Selma and shows like When They See Us — stories based on real events — the pictures and performances are powerful enough in isolation to speak for themselves, and things eventually fall into place. In movies like A Wrinkle in Time and shows like this one, however, the result can be disastrous. In DMZ, even as characters like Alma move through unfamiliar territory, there’s little sense of danger or discovery, given how focused the camera is on characters’ closeups, rather than their relationship to the world around them. While this helps ground us in Alma’s desperation to find her son, Christian (Bryan Gael Guzman), from whom she was separated in the early days of the war, it does little to make this New York feel like a living, breathing space with a volatile history, and does even less to justify the first episode’s race-against-the-clock structure, as the hours count down on Alma’s exit window from the DMZ. Kris Bowers’ music is propulsive, but while the dialogue would have us believe the city is a powder keg, it’s really an empty barrel. By the time director Ernest Dickerson takes the reins for episodes 2 through 4 — his shot-to-shot relationships are much more legible than DuVernay’s — the world doesn’t open up all that much more. Despite the vast majority of screen time being set in the DMZ, the show rarely offers a sense of what it’s like to live there from day to day.
This is especially dispiriting given the source material, which transposed an Iraq and Afghanistan-style invasion to U.S. shores (with Abu Ghraib imagery in tow), making Americans the victims of their own military, and creating a hellishly unpredictable environment that suited the story. In contrast, there’s a plainness to the show’s New York, where street corners are set-dressed with the bare minimum — the odd abandoned bus here, a long patch of grass there — and people seem generally nonplussed about whatever’s brewing outside their borders, or even inside them. Granted, it attempts to update its political setting by discarding much of the post-9/11 invasion imagery, but it rarely swaps it out for anything meaningful. An early conversation hints at a tale of border-crossing, and the way real-world ICE and DHS policies could be turned on Americans, but it’s quickly discarded. While both the comic and the show try to elicit empathy in the same insular way — “What if the things America did to foreigners were done to U.S. citizens?” — the comic at least follows through on its premise in a gritty and gut-wrenching manner.
The show, by comparison, is contained to Alma’s search for Christian, even though that search ends up pulling her in various directions that happen to intersect with local politics. Alma plays a version of the comics’ Zee Hernandez, though the show’s connection to the source material is nominal at best (Zee, for one thing, didn’t have a kid in the comics). Two other major comic characters also show up, namely Spanish Harlem populist Parco Delgado (Benjamin Bratt) and a younger version of Chinatown kingpin Wilson Lee (Hoon Lee), both of whom are vying for governorship of the DMZ. It just so happens that Alma has prior connections to both Delgado and Lee (and a number of other supporting characters), giving her convenient reasons to interact with both sides of this ongoing tension as she transforms into a magic bullet of sorts, bringing about change as an outsider, despite knowing little to nothing about the area and its people.
Most of Alma’s interactions take the form of lengthy conversations steeped in callbacks to events we haven’t seen. They’re rife with “Remember when?” style reminiscing meant to convince us that, like this version of New York, these characters have a vivid past. And while Dawson’s performance is suitably frayed — and Bratt and Lee are occasionally charismatic — the dialogue rarely succeeds at carrying the entire weight of the premise or its history. So much of DMZ is told, rather than felt. So much is spoken, but so little is internalized through behavior or feeling, or externalized through action or design.
The more it goes on, the more it feels scattered. Its subplots, involving a local orphan Odi (Jordan Preston Carter) and Delgado’s fiery right-hand man Skel (Freddy Miyares), are eventually brought into the fold of the main story, but for the most part, they feel like directionless tangents. In addition to Delgado and Lee, there’s another local leader named Oona (Nora Dunn), giving Alma yet another checkpoint between which to bounce, as she spends time convincing Politician A to go to Place B in order to do Thing C, a cycle that repeats itself constantly as she tries to get her son out of the DMZ. However, few of these developments reveal anything coherent or engaging about the zone’s relationship to the outside world — a dynamic that is, at several key points, supposed to be vital to the story — and the more Alma gets pulled into the zone’s politics, the more those politics are revealed to be shockingly trite and simplistic. Where the comic, at least aesthetically, had something to say about the state of American politics and its impact on the world, the show instead opts for empty sermonizing about idealistic belief in political systems, a perspective that clashes wildly with the premise at hand, in which America has, supposedly, already crumbled.
It bears so little resemblance to the comic — visually, narratively, spiritually, and politically — that it’s hard not to wonder if it should have been an original show. More importantly, it fails to deliver on its own promise of a series focused on a mother’s journey to save her son (and eventually, save his soul). It’s a simple story concept, pre-charged and ready-made for moving drama, but it drags out every beat and every confrontation, presenting it in the most un-engaging, logic-first, plot-serving manner that saps it of nearly all emotion. In the end, neither the larger world, nor characters’ internal emotional worlds, are engaging enough to matter.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/qLKnH1b
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