Review: Black Summer
If there’s one thing that can unite people in these divided times, it’s probably the notion that whoever you are — black, white, gay, straight, male, female or non-binary — you haven’t got time to catch up with TV.
In fact, it might be the glass-half-full perspective on the modern world. Sure, the planet is dying and the Nazis have reformed like a nightmarish historical boyband, but there sure are a lot of entertaining series out there to distract us while the sound of jackboots drowns out the thump of the final orangutan falling from the world’s last tree.
For new readers: Yes, that IS me being glass-half-full.
Anyway, with all this TV content, you might have missed Black Summer, one of Netflix’s endless cycle of new series. Despite sounding like a rejected pitch for an episode of Rick & Morty, it’s actually a zombie apocalypse show, set during a fraught 48-ish hours at the beginning of an outbreak of… look, you get the idea. The only thing that gets made more often than new Netflix series is zombie movies, so picture the scene in any given one of them where suburban society is caught flat-footed by the ravenous undead. It’s that bit, but stretched to series length. Oh, and we’re doing running zombies, here, not the classic shamblers. Everyone clear? Great.
Already, we’ve hit on a pretty major problem with Black Summer: Everyone has seen this story before. It feels like (and sometimes directly lifts from) the opening scenes of Zack Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake, which was much better than what’s on offer here.* Within the first few minutes, we see a character who is clearly infected and trying to hide it, and rather than creating tension it makes you want to roll your eyes and say “Do people STILL try to pretend they’re not infected?! It’s 2019, haven’t they seen any zombie movies?!”
The initial device designed to set Black Summer apart from the zombie horde is that the plotlines interweave around a single suburban block. Characters that are the main focus of one thread run through the background of scenes featuring characters from another. It’s a neat trick that feels a little like the riffle shuffled order of Pulp Fiction. We see a mother separated from her daughter, a meek older lady trying to navigate to safety in one of the few working vehicles, a squad of soldiers trying to bring in a prisoner, and a mysterious figure wandering calmly through the carnage. All of them will interact to some degree, some sooner than others.
Sadly, these opening scenes are the best the show has to offer.
Spoilers ahead, so if you want to duck out now, my quick summation is that this is one of those shows that will kill a few hours if you’ve got nothing better to do, but that’s about all.
Early on, we’re introduced to the concept that main characters are going to be killed off quickly and without mercy. Which is bold, but soon becomes counterproductive as the audience stops caring about anyone on screen. When lives are this disposeable, it’s hard to get emotionally invested. This is exacerbated by the fact that one of the only characters with a stated purpose — the mother who got separated from her daughter in the opening scenes — is driven by a need to find someone we only saw for a few minutes. When a show is bumping off named players left and right, it’s hard to give a shit about whether a woman gets to reunite with Whatshername, the daughter with no lines.
Considering how quickly the show and its monsters chew through characters, the plotting is actually fairly slow. This is until the last couple of episodes in the show’s eight episode run, where everyhing goes… what’s a polite way to say “full retard” ?
Final warning on spoilers.
At one point, a group of survivors attempt to take refuge in a school, only to be lured into a trap by feral kids. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, as society has apparently only just started to break down and these kids are already heavily armed and re-enacting Lord of the Flies.
If the message of this show was that kids are the fucking worst then I’d be completely on board, but it isn’t, and so we’re left with a weird plot wobble that foreshadows how clownshit crazy the writing will get. Having escaped the school, all characters end up taking shelter in the same diner, and then… well, then they decide to go into the city and pull off a carefully orchestrated heist of weapons from some sort of still-operational sex dungeon and nightclub. This NightDungeon has a shitload of military grade hardware in the basement, for reasons that are obvious if you’re deranged and writing a zombie show for Netflix. Those of us who don’t fit that description will be left with questions.
In the middle of said heist, one character stabs an unknown person for reasons that aren’t discussed, causing them to die and kickstart a wave of zombies rampaging through the dungeon club. This could have made for a really effective scene, but it didn’t.
Having escaped, the protagonists regroup and are now armed to the teeth, which sets us up for the stupidest episode of anything I’ve ever seen. Honestly, if you’re going to watch anything of this show, just watch the last episode. It clocks in at a truncated 20 minutes and it’s so incompetent in so many ways that it’s actually kind of glorious. Don’t worry about not knowing who anyone is — every character is pretty much whatever they need to be in any given scene. Our nominal heroine, for example, is a traumatised suburban mom who has largely shied away from violence, and then at the end of Black Summer she picks up an MP5 with the slick handling and steely gaze of a veteran SWAT team commander.
As our heroes finally make it to their destination — a football stadium that has been made safe and from which a military evacuation is due to start — they converge with countless other groups of survivors. All of them have machine guns and all of them have the infinite ammo cheat code enabled, so what follows is twenty solid minutes of unconvincing extras running in multiple directions and pretending to hose each other down with machine gun fire.
I say “pretending” because it appears that most of the guns don’t do anything and the muzzle flashes and sound effects were added in post production. If you’ve ever seen kids playing games that involve running around and shouting “bang” while pointing something that is emphatically not a working firearm, then you’ll have seen something approaching the end of Black Summer. Except that it’s much, much stupider when adults do it.
The whole thing is compounded by the fact that somehow, everyone involved forgot that the imaginary bullets are meant to cause real injuries. Zombies are riddled with every imaginable type of small arms fire, and then turn to the camera and reveal perfectly clean shirts. I refuse to believe that a company with Netflix’s bottomless pockets couldn’t afford some squibs for the actors to wear, or even some CGI blood splatter, but instead we’re left with zero-stakes, bloodless shooting in every direction. As if to highlight the problem, at one stage a bomb is dropped on the streets, and there doesn’t seem to have been enough budget for an explosion. This means that for no real reason, all the actors fall over with varying degrees of believability and then some fake smoke is gently wafted across the camera.
There’s a lot of criticism in the zombie genre about how people are overly competent with weapons — hitting a head-sized target whilst running and firing one-handed is damn near impossible for professionals, let alone anyone else. Black Summer’s clusterfuck finale redresses this balance single-handedly by having everyone shoot so incompetently you end up feeling they deserve to get eaten. When a zombie’s only line of attack is to charge at you face-first, standing still and waiting until they’re ten feet away would seem a pretty safe way to land a successful head shot. Instead, the characters in Black Summer can’t manage to hit a zombie’s head four feet away using a three foot shotgun. Except for one tiny lady who can accurately mow down waves of the undead by firing an Uzi from the hip. Gun nerds will recognise the Uzi as a weapon famous for sporadic accuracy and nightmarish recoil. By that point, however, any suspension of disbelief has long shattered and the superhuman wrist strength of a ninety pound Korean woman is the least laughable thing on screen.
Taken on its face, Black Summer is a mediocre zombie show with an amusingly terrible final episode. However, there’s a deeper level on which it just might be brilliant. If you squint, you can just about imagine that the final episode is a satire of where America will be in ten years, politically; everyone running around like headless chickens, heavily armed and shooting in all directions for no reason. Indeed, the whole show might be some sort of meta-textual comment — the zombie genre itself is staggering along well after it should have died.
But it’s more likely that Black Summer is just a mediocre zombie show with a terrible final episode.
*Dawn of the Dead really should be talked about more often for being a double-rarity — a good remake AND a good Zack Snyder movie.