All of Us Are Dead (2022)

Slightly disappointing

As a zombie series fan I was really excited for All Of Us are Dead's premiere, but I ended up being slightly disappointed. I loved the very first episode, it was a very well paced first episode; even though the CG rubbed me off the wrong way but I'm not going to elaborate on that.
I found the show slightly underwhelming because as the episodes went on, the plot wasn't really advancing in any way; every time the students tried to change the spots within the school, the outcome was predictable.
There's a lot of unnecessary subplots and also quite a lot of plot holes that I can't really wrap my head around, but I've figured they did that as a tool for a second season. I did enjoy the friends' dynamic. Though I wished they actually showed more of that. Like the way they were acting before the virus broke out or some characteristics that would make them more three dimensional and not so flat.
Overall, it wasn't a bad show but I had higher expectations from it.

Lire davantage

i couldn’t stop crying in the last ep, so it’s obv a 10

it literally became one of my favorite dramas it is so good! normally i am not a big fan of hyped dramas because i have the fear that is actually bad BUT I LOVED IT! the plot it’s so good and never gets tiring and the characters are so amazing. To be honest, I cried a lot, I COUDN’T STOP CRYING IN THE LAST EP. I hated that the writers killed cheongsan, but I still have some hope for him to come back in s2. I really loved the characters specially namra, cheongsan, mijin and suhyeok AND OBVIOUSLY MY FAVORITE COUPLE WAS ONJO AND CHEONGSAN, I CRIED SO MUCH FOR THEM 😭😭😭 but yeah i loved all of us are dead sm and it’s so worth watching it💗

Lire davantage

Run

Run is the word you will hear from the mini series

As usual started calm then all breaks loose, ground zero is hyosan high school and a good thing about this mini series is the director stick within ground zero, story is incomplete and for sure, since it was well received there should be a prequel and a sequel.

Actors and Actress gave their natural environment performance, looks like we will be seeing more of the students in the future, kind of a way introducing the young actress and actors in a mini series, this was done in GTO where the young talent started and mentored by senior actors/actress. hoping to see more of Park Ji Hoo, Jo Yi Hyun and Park Solomon in the future korean series.

Music was just ok, but nothing outstanding bgm, hopefully music will be payed attention in the sequel and prequel

Would i rewatch, yes,
Zombie marathon series during the holiday seasons

Overall it is just good, this cannot top kingdom story wise, potential wise, sequel can take where the classroom leader can jump from the a 8 story building, and prequel can take where the virus was found and why?

If you like mystery and zombie series, add this to your list, the actresses are good and park solomon has a potential to take a lead action role in the future.

Lire davantage

The most emotional zombie drama I've ever watched

This one’s a toughie! On one hand, I absolutely fell head over heels for all of the characters in this drama and absolutely loved the fresh new take on the zombie genre. On the other, there were simply too many instances where logic was completely thrown out the window and the characters were frustrating as hell to watch. My main gripes probably were due to the amount of self-sacrifice and very cliche survival tropes which sometimes repeated themselves in the drama. The drama also created a seemingly impossible survival situation for our main characters. The zombies were simply too fast and there were too many of them for their survival to make sense half the time. I mean, hell, the characters are almost always facing them head on and we’re just supposed to believe that most of them can get out of it alive time and time again? I feel like humanity would die in a heartbeat if such a situation occured in real life, but I suppose the seemingly impossible stakes were there mostly to build tension so I’ll forgive it. Something that I absolutely loved about this drama in particular was the amount of side stories that went on all around even outside of the school. There was only one of them that I didn’t care for, but the rest were extremely entertaining and, although not too impactful, rounded out the story to show how everyone was impacted by the virus. I have a ton of other small complaints but I didn’t want to list them since they weren’t too bothersome and would make me look like a bit of a jerk haha. I would definitely recommend this drama to my zombie lovers, but I would warn them not to take the drama too seriously and be prepared with some tissues, because the best part of the kdrama is definitely the emotions it made me feel, especially at the end!

Lire davantage

You need to step into the shoes of the antagonist to watch this drama and its too unnecessarily stretched. The original niche for the drama includes target audience that expect rom-com in any drama they watch and its delivered in a very deliberate manner. It was unnecessary. I mean they are in a virus aka zombie apocalypse which they call it as. The plot is very poor and its quite clear whats going to happen. To continue the story, they are forcibly moving to other places and doing stuff thats not needed or demanding. I just cant write more coz the entire drama is a mess. Sorry to say, but thats the truth. The origin or the concept of patient zero is not at all touched apart from harnessing concepts like teen pregnancy, abuse, social barriers, etc superficially. Instead of focussing on key issues, they just targeted so many random issues all at once with no depth in acting by the novices. The villian is like undefeatable and wasnt promising at all. The other characters didnt have any development. If I had to watch it through my perspective, there should have been much investment on development of story, how the virus originated, at least should have made it understandable. These observations accounts to only 1 or 2% of the experienced mess. The movie goes nowhere expect for the niche expecting a second season.

Lire davantage

So much wasted potential...

I've never written a review before, but this is the most frustrating kdramas I've ever watched. If it wasn't for sunk cost fallacy, I would've stopped watching it at ep 6, but I pushed on only to be rewarded with disappointment after disappointment.

My main issue is with the writing. So before I jump into that, I'll say that the drama LOOKED really good. It definitely had that Netflix budget. Some of the acting was top tier. The zombies themselves were convincingly terrifying. Love a surprise Lee Kyu Hyung appearance. A lot of their survival instincts and plans had believable merit.

Unfortunately, these details could not save the show's biggest flaw: the writing.

I think the reason I ended this show feeling so pissed off was because it had so much wasted potential. All the plot threads for a smart, compelling, satisfying drama were there, but they were mostly left hanging. At points, I felt like the writers were actually trolling us by purposely setting up an interesting character arc only to let it fizzle without a purpose. I'll detail the most egregious ones below:

‧ So Ju (On Jo's father) - Set up from the beginning as one of the main story lines, we saw So Ju fight against all odds to prove that a father's love could overcome anything. He was trapped, attacked multiple times, put under lockdown, shot (don't even get me started on how multiple trained soldiers couldn't shoot one man running without cover), gut-punched by a tree and yet he still made his way to the school. Just in time, he manages to randomly (the guy has been through so much, i'll overlook this incredibly unlikely luck) discover On Jo and her friends in a gym detached from the main school building. He somehow breaks a thick metal chain to free them and unites with his daughter. It's touching, it's a relief, it's satisfying. But not 10 minutes later, despite flares working to distract the zombies, he's sacrificing himself for no apparent reason and sending his daughter and crew off to face more unknown dangers on their own again. And that was that. A fleeting payoff followed by a nonsensical self-sacrifice that probably resulted in more characters dying than would've if he'd been there to guide them further.

‧ Gwi Nam (and the bullying storyline) - Yoo In Soo's acting as a villain was really well done. He was appropriately terrifying and fully psychotic. At some point it turned and became comical how many times he popped back up to be a threat, but I still think he was a good villain in theory. However, his hyper-fixation on Chung San and the forced conflict between them was frustrating when the obvious and much better story arc of Eun Ji getting her revenge was RIGHT THERE. Instead, the sympathy that was built up for the bullied duo was dashed by showing them both to be awful people at their core which sent a really weird message. Also, what was the point of Eun Ji going back to light the school on fire? My expectation was that our main group would find themselves trapped on the roof as the fire spread and needing to make an escape, but instead we got a few lit up pieces of paper and then... nothing. Let's also not forget that there's implication that Soo Hyeok used to run with Gwi Nam's crowd meaning he was probably a pretty awful bully himself up until recently and yet we're supposed to see him as one of the most likable and righteous members of the main group.

‧ The wasted potential of so many fleeting characters and pointless introductions - What was the point of the pregnant high school student? What did that story beat add to the drama? What was the significance? Just to eventually give the cops something to do? Same with the youtuber. He could've been used as a plot vehicle to show the outside world what was really going on but instead he existed just to take up screen time. Now, don't get me wrong. One of my favorite parts of the show was the cop duo. They had great chemistry and Lee Kyu Hyung just brings his A game to every supporting character he plays. Unfortunately, as soon as they left the police station, their purpose in the story disappeared. Better drama?: Following the two cops as they went around saving people. Better plot thread?: Letting them be the ones who retrieved the laptop. The writing robbed them of their one useful job in the story halfway through the drama. What about the assemblywoman? What was her purpose aside from delaying So Ju from saving his daughter? It was mentioned that she had kids so the least they could've done was reveal that one of the main students was her child. It would've made her a hundred times more compelling and it would've given her a deeper connection with So Ju. Wouldn't have been awesome if her child was Nam Ra? Or Na Yeon?! It was all right there and just never capitalized on. I'll just briefly mention the wasted potential of the caring teacher, the brother/sister connection (Woo Jin was given so little development/to do as a character that I didn't even realize he existed until the group was thinned out by zombies), the military commander...

‧ Na Yeon. Sigh. We were absolutely baited by the potential of a well rounded character arc. Like many of the characters, she was just a bad, cruel person for no real discernible reason. Lots of high school students are catty or dramatic or brats, but they don't have it in them to just murder fellow classmates in a survival situation because they feel left out and ignored. But in directly and purposely sending Gyeong Soo to his death isn't the worst thing about her character - it's what happens after that. We see her hiding in the closet, stocked up with food and drinks (let me say here that the lack of attention to the fact that the students haven't had food/real water in days is odd), and she seems truly and emotionally remorseful. Surely, she's going to provide them with sustenance and win a little of their forgiveness, right? No. She hears them talking bad about her and stays put. Fine. Surely they're just upping the drama to make her revealing herself more impactful, right? No. We finally see her snapping out of her pathetic pity party and packing things up to meet them. We get an odd flashback to the teacher (another person who dies unnecessarily because of Na Yeon's selfishness and stupidity) begging her to make amends and do something helpful for the group to redeem herself. If you squint, there's even a potentially possibility that maybe she WASN'T the one who infected Gyeong Soo after all. The set up is there. She'll save them by providing food and water and apologize. She'll explain her motivations further. Wrong. She dies. Maybe. We don't really see her turn for sure so maybe she's alive or turned into one of those hybrids. Okay, writers. Surely, SURELY this means we're going to see her pop up in the future, somehow saving the group or sacrificing herself to give her story some kind of satisfying closure? Wrong again. We get a pan shot of the zombies in a future episode and there she is. So. That's that then.

‧ The On Ju/Cheong San relationship - We know from the very beginning that he's into her. We assume that she's also hiding the fact that she's into him. But that doesn't ever really happen. She seems fully focused on her crush on Soo Hyeok up until Cheong San confesses to her. She responds with anger saying she's now lost him as a friend (which isn't necessarily unjustified) and doesn't reciprocate his feelings. After Cheong San gets bit we see a tiny spark of what maybe could've been, but does she actually have romantic feelings for him or is it just guilt? We never really see any indication that she loves him in any way other than just a best friend. She never learns what 'left' meant. It's all just kind of awkward and underdeveloped when a few small changes could've made it a much more interesting and emotional relationship dynamic.

This drama would've benefited from dropping about 10 characters, developing the ones left over better and pulling in the plot tighter. The potential was all there (which is what made the viewing experience so frustrating). The side plots were so much more interesting and compelling than the main group's most of the time (I've already praised the cop duo but I also thought the group headed by Ha Ri and Mi Jin was so much more interesting and defined and I wish we'd followed them instead). The pacing was off (how could things drag but also feel so glossed over? how much time exactly had even passed since the outbreak started?) and so much time was wasted on things that served no purpose to the story. And then, just when I'm finally on the last ten minutes of this struggle of a show, they introduce a new plot that is actually interesting and fresh (a congregation of a new breed of zombie hybrids with superhuman abilities! lead by the most likable character with the most significant growth and development!) and that's where it ends.

And this is where my review will also end. Because I could go on, but I've covered more than enough. I've never felt compelled to write a review like this and there's definitely been some terrible shows I've watched. But the thing that sets this one apart is that it had so many ingredients to be a GREAT show. It could've really been an amazing, fresh twist on the zombie genre but it just dropped the ball over and over again. One or two pointless plots or underdeveloped characters would've been forgivable, but we were given the bones of a zombie drama without any meat.

Lire davantage

Come Back To It

So I first started this show the minute that it aired on Netflix and I only got to half the second episode before I quit. I was bored and wasn't really feeling up for another zombie show when at the time, it seemed like it was all that was on TV. So I dumped it and moved on.

But! Less than a year later, I browsing Lomon's page and trying to find out what else I'd seen him in, since I was watching Revenge of Others and guess what! He played the main role in All of Us Are Dead (and some other shows that I'd watched). But since I hadn't actually watched All of Us Are Dead, I decided to give it another try for him. And I am so so glad I did.

Now I'm not saying this because I'm currently stanning Lomon. ( I am stanning him but that's a whole different point.) I think this was genuinely an amazing show.

Acting -
These kids are doing amazing. I am genuinely so impressed by their portrayal of their characters and how genuinely they come across. They gave amazing performances with perfect chemistry. They felt like friends, they had their jokes and their drama and pettiness. They portrayed being teenagers perfectly.

The rest of the cast also did a phenomenal job. The detective was a massive DILF and I loved every one of his scenes. His heartbreak at the state of the world, and his hope that he can keep the kids safe. The general played cool and rational and coldhearted while subtly being able to convey that every decision he is making is taking a toll on him and he doesn't want to be making them. The soldiers who follow orders no matter what even if they don't want to and you are screaming with frustration at them for not disobeying and yet you know that no matter what they will follow orders to the letter because that is how they are conditioned. The parents who would run into danger for their kids, and the kids who are dealing with so much trauma that they don't know how to react to all of it so some of it hits them like a tidal wave and they are frozen, depressed, suicidal or they some they just compartmentalize until they can deal with it later.

Plot -
Believable. It has been three years since Covid started and I can still remember how chaotic that time was. Now take a zombie virus that is quick and deadly and put in human stupidity and drama and all the rest and you've got reality. I think the most unbelievable part is that the military actually does a pretty adequate job in containing the disease for how deadly it is. (Although I did think a lot about how birds would naturally become zombies by eating the decaying bodies and therefore it would be impossible to actually contain the zombie virus, but I guess i have to suspend my disbelief in some things because at the end of the day, this is a zombie show).

Even the love triangle/square was believable. Because in that scenario, you aren't just going to forget that you like someone, even if you are in a super chaotic environment. It's cute and it adds moments of softness to a very action packed drama.

I definitely recommend the show.
Go into it with an open mind and you will be pleasantly surprised.

Lire davantage

Ahhhh....Zombies! All of us are dead: Review

Ah. Zombies.

All Of Us Are Dead.

I mean….of course we are. Let’s face it, we all have a zombie apocalypse survival plan. Don’t we? Because if you don’t, you probably don’t have enough imagination to enjoy this show, much less survive an actual apocalypse. But even with a plan, would you make it?

Me? Nah. I had to stop and check my blood pressure too many times, just while watching. LOL. The action is almost non-stop through most episodes. The amount of adrenaline coursing through my veins as I watched could have powered a small city for a hot minute. It was hard to simply sit through these episodes quietly. You’re either cheering someone on or wanting to throw someone off the roof. I can’t imagine what it was like to film this because there was something going on constantly. The special effects were fabulous, the acting was on point, and….someone commented about plot holes. Are you stupid?? What plot holes?? If you listen to the dialogue (or in my case, read the subs) they explained everything at one point or another. Even the science of the virus itself is explained, and the parts that weren’t explained were stated as unknown or unknowable within the script itself. Maybe there are some plot holes that I missed, but I can’t think of any. I actually do have a couple of questions, but I hope for those to be answered in Season 2.

The plot of the show is pretty simple and as expected: Survive. It centers around a group of high-schoolers trying to help each other survive and get to safety. There are heroes and there are anti-heroes. There is bravery and cowardice. There is fear. Disappointment. And a lot of death. (Too much happening to get a kill-count.) But don’t worry. The government will make everything right. They will, won’t they? Won’t they?

It’s not all bad though. Well, actually it is, but there are some sweet moments that will endear you to the characters, as well as some truly heroic actions by some truly heroic people. There are even heroic actions by some who would prefer to be anything other than a hero. There is friendship and trust and love. But mostly death.

If you don’t like blood and gore, then this is not for you. If you get attached to characters, assume they will die. If you’re looking for a happy ending….well, there is an ending. I don’t know that I would call it happy.

Enjoy!

Lire davantage

Why would I re-watch 'All of us are dead'?

Hello! This is my first ever review so please bear with me if it goes here and there at times. I have finished this drama within 2 days of its' release. Honestly, enjoyed watching it so much. There are a few obvious plot holes (come on writers ain't super humas to not have any) but while we watch the series they go unnoticed. I absolutely loved the emotions carried by the cast. The series had me sitting on the edge. The series COULD have been concluded in lesser episodes, at times it kinda feels dragged or maybe slowed down. But again, while watching it won't feel tiring at all.

So, the main question as why I would re-watch it? The BG score was so subtle, at times you just get into the scene and the score won't feel like an extra addition that was forced. This kind of stands out. I watched the trailer after finishing the series and then noticed how well they have composed it. Especially the whistle version of Auld Lang Syne which was by Cheong-San in the series was nicely put towards the outro of the trailer making it extra heavy. That song means farewell indeed. The series had my most favourite characters dying from episode to episode, and I really have complaints against it. My heart sank so much I would re watch it just to see those characters live and laugh on screen once more.

With zombies coming from everywhere right from the first minute, this series kept me hanging on to it even after 5 days of finishing it. I would definitely recommend you to watch it, at least to appreciate the production.

I understand I just had too many thoughts and no proper structure in my review. I promise to get better while I review further. Thanks if you read me till here.

Lire davantage

All of Us Are Dead? More like All of Us Are Crying!

Just don't watch while eating! Not recommended!

I wasn't going to watch a zombie drama given how gory I heard this drama was. But the thriller surprisingly got me hooked! I was gasping, wincing, and sobbing pretty much every ep. What an emotional rollercoaster!

It's only the start of 2022, but already this show is too good to be able to top. Some thoughts I have though: I thought we would get a redemption arc for this girl student just for her to get eaten in a horrendous death. What an evil writer-nim! Cheongsan literally carried the show the way he dashed like Sonic everywhere. He's easily my fave and deserves better. It's a shame he had to like his childhood friend. Please, can we just get rid of the flour sack he kept dragging around? She needed more support than a grandma the way she kept needing assistance for everything!! Does she think she's a princess?? I have never met a more pathetic, useless, and irritating looking female "lead". What is she leading?? She has literally done nothing in this show except cry and give cringe lines.

Done with rant. Other than that girl, this show was amazing!! Props to all the zombie actors!!!! You have my respect.

Lire davantage

"Si eres un buen amigo, la ayudaras."

Increíble que a la persona que le dijeron esa frase termino siendo el que más ayudo a los demás en toda la serie... Su fin era protejer a On-jo pero termino dando su vida por todos.

Me gusto más de lo que esperaba y la verdad a mi parecer supieron cómo hacerte encariñar con cada personaje haciendo que la perdida de algunos fuera dura. Pero sin duda la muerte de algunos causo menos sentimiento que otras.

El final nos dejó todos a la espera de que realicen una segunda temporada en la que podamos ver que sucede con las personas que son medio zombis...

Lire davantage