Let’s start things off with a confession: I am not a horror fan. I have not read this comic and I have not consumed much, if any, zombie fiction. So why am I watching this show? Because it’s on AMC. Having seen Mad Men and Breaking Bad, I have fairly high expectations and at least some hope that they will be able to make something interesting that I can enjoy. I was not let down.
We are introduced to our hero and sheriff’s deputy, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), walking alone among abandoned cars when he finds a little girl alive. Or at least he thinks she is alive until she turns around and we see her open, Two-Face-like mouth. As she begins stumbling towards Rick, he headshots her.
Going back to the past, we find Rick with his partner, Shane (Jon Bernthal), discussing women troubles when they get a call to assist in a car chase. They manage to get the car off the road with road spikes, and eventually shoot down all of the criminals firing at them, but not before Rick is shot in the side. He is taken to the hospital and awakes an indeterminate amount of time later to find himself alone. The building has no power and he encounters a message scrawled on a door saying “Don’t Open Dead Inside.”
Rick leaves the hospital, still suffering from his not fully healed wound, and finds signs of a battle with tanks and helicopters laying around unattended. He sees his first zombie, although without any legs and eventually winds up at his house looking for his family. Rick is then hit in the head with a shovel by Duane Jones and his father Morgan (Lennie James). They tell him the situation: “walkers” bite people and infect them. The infection starts as a fever that kills the victim and then they are later revived. They have to be shot in the head to be killed. Zombies are drawn to sound, so gunshots are not always the safest option.
Morgan and Duane were heading to Atlanta where there is supposed to be shelter and many people that survived, but Morgan’s wife was infected and he could not bring himself to leave. Rick takes them to sheriff’s headquarters in the town and equips them and himself with weapons. Rick leaves them to find his family in Atlanta since he believes they are alive. As he heads out of town, a group of survivors, of which his wife and son and Shane are a part of, hear him but cannot contact him back. Shane is also seen making out with Rick’s wife.
Rick heads into Atlanta on horseback as he runs out of gas and hearing a helicopter sound, gets surrounded by a swarm of zombies. He narrowly escapes into a tank. Thinking himself done for he hears a voice on the transmitter in the tank saying “Hey you…dumbass…yeah you in the tank…cozy in there?”
My first impression of the show is that it is pretty gruesome. Flies are everywhere, although luckily there were no maggots. Entrails are shown pretty frequently and blood splatters are common since walkers get shot in the head fairly often (although the blood seems a good small amount unlike the amount you might find in Spartacus for example). Except for the flies, I found everything manageable.
I was a little worried at first because one of Rick’s first lines is “son of a bitch shot me, you believe that?” which sounded very cliché. That was the only thing I could think when I heard him say that, but soon after it stops feeling that way. Maybe I should credit Lennie James for that. Judging by IMDB, it looks like he may only be in the pilot which is a pretty terrible decision as he was great in Jericho and he gave a great performance here as well. I was with him for less than half an hour but I really felt myself caring about him when he was considering whether or not to shoot his zombified wife.
Andrew Lincoln also gave a credible performance. I liked that he first questioned his sanity a little bit and the scene with the little girl zombie in the beginning and the crawling zombie in the middle were well done by him. The pacing and music in the latter were actually fairly phenomenal. After the scene where he shoots the deputy, I thought this was going to go in a typical action/horror direction, but the crawling zombie scene was surprisingly poignant.
Again, except for the flies, a lot of the dead body scenes are actually somewhat, if not beautiful, certainly artistically done. I was especially drawn to the image of the crows/ravens picking at the dead soldier’s body laying across a tank’s main gun, the same tank that Rick hides in at the end. The last scene becomes pretty gruesome with the zombies devouring the horse, but I could not help but get excited when hearing Wang Chung’s “Space Junk” playing. Everything clicked in this pilot.
I cannot say that this will be an especially deep show from the pilot, nor can I say it will not since I have not read the comic and I do not want to spoil myself by reading a summary. But I am excited about the execution. So far, the pacing and music has been splendid, and acting has been very good. Lincoln seems capable at the least, although we have not been introduced to too many other people. There was not too much character dialogue here, the majority of the time being taken up with explaining the events to Rick (and the viewer), and I imagine the next few episodes will probably be heavy on that as well, but again, it was well executed so I did not mind. This was pretty awesome so I am definitely going to keep watching.
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