TV Review: DMZ: Season 1, Episode 1 [HBO Max, SXSW 2022]

DMZ Season 1 Episode 1 Review

DMZ: Season 1, Episode 1: Good Luck premiered at the 29th Annual South By Southwest Film Festival this week, and although it may be the first entry in HBO Max’s new limited series it feels like a familiar retread.

Based on Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s DC Comics run, DMZ is set in the near future after a second American Civil War. The island of Manhattan has become a demilitarized zone between the U.S.A. and the F.S.A. (the “Free States of America”), with the Hudson river acting as the border. No official fighting between the U.S.A. and F.S.A. occurs on the island, however the stalemate is rumored to be weakening.

With roughly 300,000 citizens still residing on the island due to a mix of failed evacuation protocols and pure human stubbornness, Manhattan is essentially cloistered off from the rest of North America. City life remains cobbled together, with bangin’ hang-outs and vibrant makeshift marketplaces showcasing the city’s resilient and effervescent social fabric. But in the midst of war such positive vibes ironically make up the city’s underbelly, as violent gangs and vigilantes take precedent in prowling the streets and jockeying for control of the borough. One such leader is Parker Delgado (Benjamin Bratt), leader of the Spanish Harlem Kings, who is attempting to rally multiple warring factions together behind a push for Manhattan’s sovereignty (over which he’d rule as governor).

Meanwhile, Alma Ortega (Rosario Dawson), a nurse stationed in Brooklyn to treat F.S.A. migrants, undertakes a dangerous (and to most of her peers, crazy) mission: venturing into the DMZ, instead of out of it. She’s searching for her son, Christian, who was separated from her during the Manhattan evacuation. Having covertly searched for him all over the continent but to no avail, Alma assumes he can’t be anywhere else but still in Manhattan. Through abandoned subway tunnels she trudges, back into the belly of the beast, and back to the source of all her personal chaos.

At one point during her retcon mission, Alma crosses paths with Wilson (Hoon Lee), a former nursing colleague who’s since rebranded as a crime boss. They allow themselves a brief respite to share a drink, a laugh, and a cry, and while she admires Wilson’s new digs (as he’s essentially taken over the whole Chinatown neighborhood), Alma jokingly prods: “It’s all just a little on-the-nose,” to which he snarkishly retorts: “Yeah, and it works.” DMZ isn’t going for the meta-narrative approach, but that line read nonetheless displays a fair share of self-awareness.

Series producer Ava DuVernay (who also directed this pilot) and the series’ writer and showrunner Roberto Patino are less interested in the geopolitical machinations that led to this specific societal collapse than they are in the action-thriller aesthetics which it births. For instance: literally nothing is learned about the F.S.A. – their formation, their politics, etc. (I had to go to Wikipedia to find out something as simple as what the “F” stands for, because no one in the series ever says its full name) — yet there’s plenty of expository-like dumps that are really just moments for waxing depressingly with vague anti-war platitudes as the characters go about their guerrilla survival tactics. F.S.A. refugee Riley (Savanna Renee) opens the episode with a despairing over her capture, Alma regales us with her recollection of evacuation day, and DMZ medic Rose (Mamie Gummer) vents about the blatant shittiness of war whenever she can.

For a set-up that’s ripe for musings on why a nation (or, I guess, two nations) would abandon a heavily-populated and multi-ethnic metropolis, and how that ties into suburban paranoia which itself is fueled by the racism of the American project, DMZ either steers clear of it or misses it entirely – running the risk of becoming apologia for such things itself.

While the comic allegedly drew inspiration from the early stages of the Iraq War and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (using the cities of Fallujah and New Orleans as its visual basis), this adaptation pulls more from cinematic parallels ­– mostly Escape From New York, but with bits of The Warriors and 2007’s I Am Legend thrown in for good measure. To the credit of DuVernay and Patino, they don’t simply crib the styles of those that came before them; rather, they craft a new story with new characters to shepherd it (to my knowledge, Alma didn’t exist in the original comics), thus allowing underrepresented people their chance to shine in a generally whitewashed genre space. That’s not necessarily solid representation in and of itself, but giving an Afro-Cuban/Puerto Rican nurse the survivalist-thriller spotlight does do more than retransmitting the comic’s original white male journalist would.

It’s a bit too bloated and that stifles the potential for the moral garishness its setting suggests (much less a more organic execution of it), but in its shadow DuVernay includes small and tender moments that reiterate the persistence of humanity and kindness. We see these through Alma’s patience with Odi (Jordan Preston Carter), an orphaned boy who lives on the Upper West Side who sees Rose and the hospital staff as his only parental figures, and we even see this through Odi himself who manages to be optimistic despite having nothing to his name amidst a war zone. Dawson and Carter give great performances of quiet inner turmoil and steadfast dedication, while Bratt (always underrated) revels in Parker’s power trip. It’s even a prettily cluttered show when it resorts to sets and not just digital matte backgrounds.

DMZ is an amalgamation of numerous predecessors and carries very little sociopolitical bite, but with its glimmers of individuality it could very well elbow out its own space within apocalyptic survivalist fiction in its three remaining episodes. And with Ernest Dickerson taking over as director, it’ll be interesting to see how the style gets shaken up.

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