Paul TassiSenior Contributor
GamesNews and opinion about video games, technology and the internetKingdom is only six episodes long, some are an hour, but few are barely 45 minutes, so this is roughly about two-fifths of a season of The Walking Dead. And this is something I highly recommend that any fan of The Walking Dead watch, despite the change in setting and the changes in zombie “rules.”
The Walking Dead is now planning a series of bigger budget movies as the series tries to expand, and after seeing Kingdom, which surely had a large budget of its own, this is what that could look like if AMC devoted the resources for it.
KingdomNETFLIX
Kingdom works well because it tells an interesting story woven around the zombies, and it’s a welcome change from “post-apocalyptic group X goes to war with post-apocalyptic group Y while zombies attack both sides,” which has been the seven years of The Walking Dead (though things have gotten better lately). The story revolves around a plan to steal the throne from a Crown Prince, with his stepmother, the Queen, and her father, essentially a crime boss, hiding from the public the fact that the king has died and been reanimated as a zombie. If the Queen gives birth to a son, he has a greater claim to the throne than the bastard Prince, but the king’s zombie affliction starts to spread around the country uh, complicating things, to say the least.
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Perhaps the coolest thing about Kingdom is how wildly the different the zombies are from what we’ve seen before. Yes, they are fast zombies, which was true in Train to Busan and popularized in the west by 28 Days Later. But they’re also almost…vampires? When the sun comes up, they sleep during the day, hiding from the light, and then they attack in droves at night.
This leads to a few plot holes early on where you wonder why people don’t just go around cutting off their heads as they sleep to end the problem. But once the problem spreads, there are simply too many corpses to do this to, and too much to do to prepare for night assaults, plus the zombies are able to start hiding pretty well in the day in towns and the woods so it would be impossible to find them all. They are also “fast turn” zombies, so if you get bitten, you will transform into a zombie yourself in probably no more than thirty seconds, which makes containment a nightmare.
KingdomNETFLIX
The end result is a zombie drama that does both the zombie part well, and the drama part well. The storyline about the Prince, the Queen and the throne is genuinely interesting. Some of the female actors have been getting flack for their “lackluster” performances, but I didn’t really get that impression, though perhaps the subtitles make me notice that less. I interpreted the “doctor” character as being sort of shell-shocked after all the horror, but some are saying that’s bad acting. And you sort of have to know going in that over-the-top acting is being done on purpose here in many cases, and it’s just the style of the genre in Korea, so don’t let that turn you off.
I really do think it’s good for Walking Dead fans to branch outside their usual zombie fare to see how another country does it with a different setting and different types of zombies. We are not getting much non-Walking Dead zombie content in film or TV these days, so this feels like kind of a breath of fresh air. At six episodes it’s easy to get through, and its final twists will leave you wanting more. And season 2 is coming.
GamesNews and opinion about video games, technology and the internetKingdom is only six episodes long, some are an hour, but few are barely 45 minutes, so this is roughly about two-fifths of a season of The Walking Dead. And this is something I highly recommend that any fan of The Walking Dead watch, despite the change in setting and the changes in zombie “rules.”
The Walking Dead is now planning a series of bigger budget movies as the series tries to expand, and after seeing Kingdom, which surely had a large budget of its own, this is what that could look like if AMC devoted the resources for it.
KingdomNETFLIX
Kingdom works well because it tells an interesting story woven around the zombies, and it’s a welcome change from “post-apocalyptic group X goes to war with post-apocalyptic group Y while zombies attack both sides,” which has been the seven years of The Walking Dead (though things have gotten better lately). The story revolves around a plan to steal the throne from a Crown Prince, with his stepmother, the Queen, and her father, essentially a crime boss, hiding from the public the fact that the king has died and been reanimated as a zombie. If the Queen gives birth to a son, he has a greater claim to the throne than the bastard Prince, but the king’s zombie affliction starts to spread around the country uh, complicating things, to say the least.
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Perhaps the coolest thing about Kingdom is how wildly the different the zombies are from what we’ve seen before. Yes, they are fast zombies, which was true in Train to Busan and popularized in the west by 28 Days Later. But they’re also almost…vampires? When the sun comes up, they sleep during the day, hiding from the light, and then they attack in droves at night.
This leads to a few plot holes early on where you wonder why people don’t just go around cutting off their heads as they sleep to end the problem. But once the problem spreads, there are simply too many corpses to do this to, and too much to do to prepare for night assaults, plus the zombies are able to start hiding pretty well in the day in towns and the woods so it would be impossible to find them all. They are also “fast turn” zombies, so if you get bitten, you will transform into a zombie yourself in probably no more than thirty seconds, which makes containment a nightmare.
KingdomNETFLIX
The end result is a zombie drama that does both the zombie part well, and the drama part well. The storyline about the Prince, the Queen and the throne is genuinely interesting. Some of the female actors have been getting flack for their “lackluster” performances, but I didn’t really get that impression, though perhaps the subtitles make me notice that less. I interpreted the “doctor” character as being sort of shell-shocked after all the horror, but some are saying that’s bad acting. And you sort of have to know going in that over-the-top acting is being done on purpose here in many cases, and it’s just the style of the genre in Korea, so don’t let that turn you off.
I really do think it’s good for Walking Dead fans to branch outside their usual zombie fare to see how another country does it with a different setting and different types of zombies. We are not getting much non-Walking Dead zombie content in film or TV these days, so this feels like kind of a breath of fresh air. At six episodes it’s easy to get through, and its final twists will leave you wanting more. And season 2 is coming.
