Kingdom - A review

***Apologies!!***

If you're getting this post for the second time, it's because ... well, there's some new stuff going on here and when the new stuff happened, this post was lost. Now it's found. Notice anything, ahem ... a bit different? More to follow on that.

Meanwhile, back to the blog post.

I lived in Korea for a couple of years, living in downtown Seoul in an ultra-modern apartment, everything high tech and brand spanking new. Heated floors, heated toilet seats and push button custom bidet streams, for Pete’s sake.

To get to the subway, I’d walk by several small shops, often times places where the family lived in their place of business. I could see families sitting on the floor, gathered around a hibachi, eating noodles out of bowls held under their chins, or sleeping the way many Koreans do, curled up on thin mats on the floor. But that was Seoul. Ultra-modern next to traditional. High tech office buildings next to one of the ancient temples or palace walls scattered around the city.

For a long while, I didn’t have any English language TV channels. I quickly learned that, 24/7, you could always find a period show -- people in traditional Korean garb, intrigue in the royal palace, peasants starving and barely scrapping by and subject to cruelties from the ruling classes. There always seemed to be a love interest made impossible due to class or royal family. Like American soap operas, depending on the story line, people would discuss the shows, wonder what was going to happen next. It was clear the popularity of them was never going away no matter how many pop boy bands might emerge from the country.

When I saw the movie poster for Kingdom on Netflix, I knew there was no way I would skip this show. There are only six episodes, so I picked a weekend when I knew I’d be able to see them all.

My final assessment of it is … mixed, at least for the first season.

You should know that it is dubbed. I have a hard time hearing most shows, so I always have the closed captioning on. The closed captioning doesn’t match the dubbed language at all, so that was a bit confusing. The good thing is, the dubbed actors are great. It’s possible the voices are the same actors, only speaking English but I don’t know that for sure. The emotion and delivery are done well and the dubbing doesn’t detract from the story. I usually don’t like dubbing but the dialogue is quick, and subtitles would have made it difficult to keep up.

Like the traditional Korean period shows, there’s palace intrigue, starving peasants and, plenty of opportunity for some sort of love interest to develop. At the end of the six episodes the story clearly isn’t over, so there will be another season and I’m betting they’ll toss in some romance.

The story takes place in and around the area where Seoul is now, thousands of years before it was filled with skyscrapers and six lane highways. The events happen in different villages, so if you’re familiar with the city, you’ll recognize some of the neighborhoods visited during the show. That was kind of cool.

Did I mention this is a show about zombies?

The challenge with any zombie story these days is that it’s all been done. I worried that Kingdom would rely on the location and time period as their thing. The good news is, they didn’t. I won’t get into the details but these zombies operate in a way I’ve never seen before. They are fast, they are ugly, they move in hordes and the way they operate offers lots of opportunity to build suspense. The zombies are great.

But zombies are always only a vehicle for the rest of the story, and for the most part, that story is a bit predictable, slow and not all that interesting yet. There are a handful of middle-manager types that are supposed to be comic relief … a typical thing in the Korean period shows … but they’re silly and annoying and you route for them to be eaten.

Yay! That jerk is dead. Or not.

It’s a topnotch cast. You’ll recognize Doona Bae from her roles in Sense8, Cloud Atlas and others. Ji-Hoon Ju, known for his beauty, plays the prince who should be king. The production values are what you can expect from Netflix, like watching a film in every episode, and the Korean scenery is captivating.

So my final assessment is mixed but hopeful. Zombies are great. The acting and production is great. The story is a bit slow but there’s plenty of room for it to get better.