Adaptation of the Dead
Why isn’t AMC’s The Walking Dead as good as it should be?
I have kind of a thing for Zombie movies and Zombies as a trope in general. I won’t attempt to intellectualise it- I didn’t particularly care about the political messages in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead when I watched both films (though I was pretty young at the time), I just enjoyed watching a group of characters overcome (or fail to overcome) a unique challenge. For me Zombie films, books, comics, video games and so on are a subset of the ‘disaster’ genre, no different from volcanoes, killer bees or mega-sharks and giant octopi.
In particular, perhaps above all other depictions of the living dead in any medium, I love Robert Kirkman’s comic book The Walking Dead. When AMC announced that they would be filming it on a Hollywood budget with Frank Darabont directing I was understandably excited. Every issue printed since 2003 should have had a banner headline on the front that read ‘Soon to be a major series from whichever network can see an opportunity to make the greatest TV show ever’. I knew that, unlike the comic, it would be in color but otherwise assumed that the dark, difficult narrative was basically unfuckwithable. Frank Darabont may have helmed two of the more saccharine Stephen King adaptations, but they had visual flair and solid performances, and hey, the guy obviously knows supernatural horror and prisons (a large part of The Walking Dead is set in one, though the characters are more about staying inside than crawling through shit to get out, Pacific ocean or no.) With such strong source material there was no way it could be done badly.
But you see that idea was predicated on the belief that when somebody, say the Oscar-winning director of The Shawshank Redemption, wants to adapt something, like the Eisner-award winner for best ongoing series, he does so because he likes it. Sure, in the adaptation process scenes will be stretched or truncated and maybe the dialogue could be tightened up here or there but ultimately if you’ve got something as clearly cinematical as the Walking Dead already laid out in a serial format then, if you like it, there’s no reason to change a thing. If you go and add new characters and new situations then I guess that means that you don’t like the original, or that you liked the rough description given by your P.A’s assistant’s aide during your morning meeting and decided to shoot that instead of spending a whole afternoon reading comics.