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Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Kingdom

Speaking of zombies, has anyone been watching this Netflix series Kingdom? Oh my gosh. Best zombie flick ever!

It happens that I got myself onto a Netflix account as a user and straightaway became addicted to Kingdom, which I had actually never even heard of before. It is a South Korean series but comes both with voice dubbing and with subtitles. Curiously, the voice dubbing appears much more reliable than the written subtitles--not that I can speak Korean, but you know when the English subtitles sometimes don't even make sense and the dubbing does, it's pretty obvious that one does best to ignore the subtitles.

But anyway, I was instantly impressed with this classy new take on the zombie drama, which is rendered even more eerie by the strangeness and darkness of the late 17 century Asian setting and its eastern tradition interpretation of how this scourge arises in the first place. Featured as well are some entertaining echoes of classic Chinese epic literature and even of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Of course, as every zombie enthusiast knows, zombie movies are never really about zombies. The zombies tend more to be an expression of seemingly forever undead sociopolitical troubles, racial tension and fears, living humankind's ironic attraction to self destruction, and so on. These are malignancies that not only live, but live again and again.

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