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52% Tomatometer 25 Reviews 42% Audience Score 50+ Ratings DMZ leaps off the pages of the DC acclaimed graphic novel into the visual landscape of a dangerous and distorted Manhattan as one woman ...
- (25)
- Rosario Dawson
- Ernest R. Dickerson, Ava Duvernay
- March 17, 2022
Mar 17, 2022 · The world-building in “DMZ” is very frustrating because there’s so much potential in this concept that feels unexplored since the writing is content to focus on a small group of characters who feel like they never leave a block or two in Manhattan. Alma discovers that an election for control of NYC is about to go down when she gets there ...
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Mar 16, 2022 · March 16, 2022 6:45am. Rosario Dawson in DMZ Courtesy of Eli Joshua Adé/HBO MAX. Boasting a provocative premise, a solid cast and a powerhouse directorial pairing, HBO Max ‘s adaptation of ...
- A modern update with no meaningful additions.
- HBO Max's DMZ Images
- What's your favorite Rosario Dawson role?
- Verdict
By Siddhant Adlakha
Updated: Mar 14, 2022 10:18 pm
Posted: Mar 14, 2022 5:44 pm
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.
Claire Temple - Daredevil
Gail - Sin City
Jane Ramos - Jane The Virgin
Mimi Marquez - Rent
Becky - Clerks II
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HBO Max’s DMZ sands down all the edges of the grimy, visceral original comic series. The resulting story, of a mother searching for her son after a new American civil war, is both tedious from a character standpoint, and features politics that begin as incoherent before revealing themselves to be shockingly simplistic.
- Siddhant Adlakha
Mar 17, 2022 · DMZ bears the unfortunate distinction of suffering from one of the most severe pandemic disruptions on a show that’s made it to air. Originally planned as a proper ongoing series for HBO Max ...
Mar 16, 2022 · Rosario Dawson, Trending TV. ‘DMZ’ Is a Second-Civil-War Drama Without the Drama: TV Review. HBO Max. Four episodes (all screened for review). Production: Executive producers: Roberto Patino ...
Mar 13, 2022 · Episode 1 director Ava DuVernay (and her visual effects team) even craft an ominous shot fit for a movie poster, where the top of the Chrysler Building is upside-down, wedged between high-rises ...
