Marvel Zombies is an Incoherent but Bloody Good Time Nonetheless
Image Courtesy of Disney+
By Luis Zonenberg
October has finally arrived, and with it begins the countdown to Halloween! This spooky season is the perfect time to feel chills run down your spine as you watch a suitably creepy film to ring in the holiday. With plenty of terrifying films to spare, I figured to start off small with a light helping of some gory superhero antics sadly not from the Boys. This delicious appetizer is fresh from Marvel Studios, who finally brought to life the animated Marvel Zombies with plenty of laughs and blood to spare.
This show focuses on an alternate planet Earth where a zombie outbreak has ravaged the planet, turning its mightiest heroes into flesh-eating hordes of the undead. Amid the ensuing chaos is 16 year-old Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), who scrounges to make ends meet as she and her friends Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) and Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) fight to survive. A glimmer of hope arrives at their feet when they uncover a shrunken device that might hold the key to save the planet once and for all!
The series does not hold back in showing how brutal this reality is, killing off both Kate and Riri in the first episode alone. The rest of the series follows Kamala traversing the wasteland, forced to work with a “daywalker” named Eric Brooks (Todd Williams) who became Moon Knight in this reality. She soon befriends other, perhaps more familiar MCU characters, who hope to fly into outer space to use the device to call for help from the Nova Corps.
The one standout scene I really admired from the show was the flashback in Episode 3, tying off the loose ending from the What if… Zombies episode. It was appropriately bombastic and somber, providing a thrilling send-off for Black Panther while also showing the grim reality of this timeline’s world. It was very cleverly written, which is more than I can say for the series overall.
The first episode, I admit, was really fun and brilliantly immersed the viewer in this darker world, getting creative with which characters to kill off or turn into infected zombies. It seemed to continue in the second episode, with an incredibly wild opening that showed the viewer what it was like the first day the plague broke out. But as the episode progressed, it quickly devolved into another MCU project that just happened to have zombies in it.
Quippy jokes and bright imagery still appeared, but some very famous characters like Baron Zemo or Valkyrie making unusually moronic decisions that are out of character for them. It doesn’t stop there, though; there are other memorably dumbfounding moments that seem to exist just to drive the plot forward. And despite how awesome it was to see a variant of Blade—especially doubling as Moon Knight—he just felt underutilized the longer the show went on.
It’s also worth noting that the overarching villain is Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), the Scarlet Witch, yet again. Now crowning herself as the Queen of the Dead, she searches for Kamala to help her battle the Hulk, who has since absorbed the power of all six infinity stones to prevent their world from crumbling apart. The finale was an absolute blast to watch, throwing in Spider-Man, Ant-Man’s head, and plenty of sorcerers from Kamar-Taj—though the overall ending could’ve been better executed.
Throughout the show, Wanda begs Kamala for her help since, she claims, the Hulk hoards the power for himself. She consistently says she wants to use that power to fix the world and make things go back to how they were before the plague. If the show had ended with Kamala agreeing and the screen fading to white, it would’ve made for a more powerful ending shrouded in ambiguity. What we got instead felt like a cop out, having Kamala reunite with Kate and Riri as everything looks back to normal. To make things worse, the constant interruptions from a different Riri battling zombies felt rather cheap, offering a discount twist that felt more catered towards children than adults.
Storywise, the show is a mixed bag, but I do think there are some aspects that save it from being a complete waste of time. The animation, for example, is quite breathtaking. It replicates the same style from What If…?, presenting a beautiful rotoscope-like painting that you don’t want to take your eyes off of. The animation definitely amped up the energy and violence, delivering on the goods fans would want from a project like this.
The voice acting was also quite captivating, with Iman Vellani proving once again to be a fantastic lead with some dramatic depth and expert comedic delivery. Vellani works well with her supporting leads; Todd Williams and Elizabeth Olsen proved to be real highlights that elevated the tension throughout the show. Hudson Thames was also enjoyable to watch as well, bringing in a good amount of heart with his performance as the famous web-crawler.
Unlike the previous animated series from Marvel, this received a TV-MA rating, and for good reason—it’s bloody violent! The series is jam-packed with gory imagery and impressively over the top deaths, delivering on the carnage one would expect from such a premise. While it might remain more common for typical horror films or shows, this one at least offers a much-needed edge that is sorely lacking in the MCU.
This miniseries is far from being at the bottom of the barrel, but given its wild premise and more adult lean, I must say it fell shy of its full potential. Had the series tightened up the writing and tweaked some of its major character decisions, I think this project could’ve been one of Marvel’s biggest hits. As it is, Marvel Zombies remains an incoherent but bloody good watch nonetheless for any die-hard Marvel fan.
Marvel Zombies is now streaming on Disney+
Rating: ★★★ ½ of five
