“Walking Dead’: Zombies Got The Right Stuff

I haven’t been able to bring myself yet to watch last night’s premiere of “The Walking Dead,” even though it’s Halloween season and the whiff of zombies is everywhere in the air. But everyone else seemed to watch the show, and here’s what one observer thought: ‘”The Walking Dead” is finally coming to life, and it’s about time. AMC’s zombie drama…showed potential early on – the pilot had a fine, spooky mood, and the first few episodes after that had their moments – but it soon got bogged down in endless discussions about psychology, morality and the social compact. The problem wasn’t that “The Walking Dead” cared about such things – all zombie tales do, just as all Westerns care, to some degree, about the ideas of “the frontier” and so-called civilization; it was that the characters were so flat and the dialogue so clunky that every conversation sounded like a college paper on themes that would have been better articulated through action anyway…As pure filmmaking, the first five minutes of last night’s premiere might be the show’s best five minutes to date.’

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