Creator(s) – Scott M. Gimple (The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead) and Matthew Negrete (The Walking Dead, Power Rangers R.P.M.)
Starring – Alexa Mansour (Unfriended: Dark Web, The Resident), Aliyah Royale (Strange Calls, Major Crimes), and Nico Tortorella (Scream 4, Odd Thomas)
Release Date – 2020
Rating – 4/5
When I was in high school a substitute science teacher and I was talking about horror movies which quickly spilled into horror novels. It didn’t take long for the conversation to land on comics. Due to where I lived I was unfamiliar with a lot of comics because nowhere near my hometown carried them. He told me about several and a few days later he showed up with a couple for me to check out.
Among them was The Walking Dead. I fell in love with the comic series and when I was in college AMC premiered the television adaptation of the comic. I loved the show but by season 4 I was burned out. I’ve watched up to season 8 I think after I was sent them for review but the show has pretty much ran it’s course. With that being said, when I received the press release for World Beyond I was very curious about it. I reached out and AMC was nice enough to send over a review copy for me to check out. Thanks!
**Spoiler Alert** The film takes place 10 years after the day “the sky fell” with a community of survivors living in a fortified university. The adoptive daughters of one of the community’s leaders decide to leave in search of him along with two friends. He was helping a secretive organization who was trying to put an end to the zombie outbreak but after they received some cryptic messages they left to look for him. Soon after their departure they are followed by two other survivors from their community. One is a brother figure to the young girls while the other is secretly a plant who is trying to sabotage their mission. **Spoiler Alert**
The Walking Dead series has been using the same plot outline for almost a decade and it’s became stale. It’s not as dramatic as it once was and the predictability has killed the show. However, World Beyond doesn’t really step out of the standard Walking Dead premise but it does go about it in a different way which makes it a little more enjoyable. Hell, I actually enjoyed this first season and I look forward to the second.
The acting in this one is very well done with the characters being the highlight of the show. The cast is very young but their filmography speaks volumes. Some of them have been attached to some fantastic projects prior to World Beyond and they used that experience to deliver some seriously impressive performances. The characters, as I stated earlier, is the highlight of the series and the cast does a fantastic job bring them to life. Everyone involved should be very proud of the characters they created.
The story for this one mixes what the original uses with the survivors fighting other survivors while the dead wreak havoc with a much younger cast of characters that grew up in this world. The way the story is approached we still get the mankind is the real monster angle but the focus on the young characters who was forced to adapt to a new world at a younger age made the dull story fun again. The story is a still predictable but the journey is fun.
Finally, the series wouldn’t be part of The Walking Dead universe if it didn’t have amazing practical effects. We get many of the iconic make-up effects with most of the zombies looking absolutely fantastic. The bee-hive zombie is a new favorite of mine. With that being said, there is a few times where the masks on the zombies looked extremely goofy but these are few and far in between. Overall, World Beyond may be beating a dead horse by this point but it does bring a little life to a series that I felt has been dead for some time. It’s fun and if you are like me and gave up on the original Walking Dead series then I would recommend giving this one a shot.
WD TWB-I was very disappointed! IF they had cast it better and modified the script, it would have at least had a chance. From first view, the cast threw it off….