All of Us Are Dead (2022)
Review of All of Us Are Dead / 지금 우리 학교는 (2022)
I will admit, I’ve already done a review of All of Us Are Dead. I covered it over for the movie and television news outlet I write for, Movieweb. the day it came out.
That day I woke up at six am in order to cover all the episodes in time to get the review out, then I had a nasty surprise when it was twelve episodes. I thought it was eight episodes long, like The Silent Sea, but I was very, very wrong about that.
I also did not realize that fact until I was at episode eight and realized oh shit, it says there are another four episodes to go. And that, my friends, is when I finally learned how to write the review as I’m watching.
I did genuinely want to watch the show outside of my work schedule though, so it was a win-win situation. But man do I have a lot of thoughts leading out of this show and the plot, so let us just dive right into this. I am quite conflicted, after all.
A Korean high school is ground zero for the zombie apocalypse and one group of students has to survive.
That sentence above is basically the nutshell of All of Us Are Dead. We start out the show with scenes showing us a boy being bullied by the main bully, Gwi-nam, and he ends up being killed after Gwi-nam pushes him off of a roof.
His father, the science teacher of their high school, is called in to identify the body, but it turns out his son is now a zombie.
We learn later in the show that the father is some big brain molecular biology Ph.D. from an American Ivy League, so what does he do?
He puts his zombie son into a suitcase after beating him with a Bible and brings him home. Where he then bites his mother. But the science teacher doesn’t stop there. He brings his zombie-infested rats to the high school—what a genius—where a student is bitten after snooping around.
Before all hell breaks loose, our main students are established quite clearly. There’s On-jo, whose father is a firefighter. More on him later. Cheong-san seems to have a one-sided love with On-jo, which is a recurring theme throughout this show. Nam-ra is the class president, while her love interest is Su-hyeok.
There’s also Gwi-nam, who is shown to literally sexually assault one student before the zombie outbreak begins. What a charming guy he is. For the sake of this review, we’re only going to identify these five, although the group that initially survives is much bigger than these few people.
The zombie outbreak is a grand event in the show, that’s for sure. The camera switches to a handheld that’s on the ground, so we’re actually following some cameraman’s shaking hands and poor running abilities as the students rapidly descend into chaos and turn into zombies.
The initial girl who was bitten was taken to the hospital, which is where the outbreak spreads to the rest of the country, and inside of the school, the school nurse is the first one to actually turn and start this entire mess.
Initially, the stakes are high in the show. They’re a small group of students sheltering inside of classrooms and making makeshift bathrooms (an attempt to insert humor into this, I see), and their story consists of little things like rescuing someone.
But then Gwi-nam is turned into a zombie and naturally swears revenge upon Cheong-san, who is the entire reason he got killed.
A big plot twist that makes this show more unique than other zombie shows is that some zombies show the ability to be more human, except for when their hunger takes over.
Eventually, though, it becomes quite boring when the show shifts to just surviving and living since the big bad government said to leave the students there. That’s a cliche since we’ve seen a lot of zombie movies and shows tackle this topic.
Anyways, the show really begins to lose focus when it starts turning its gears away from the students. We see the cop who interrogated the science teacher, who heroically sacrifices himself, trying to get to his computer at the high school.
Then there’s On-jo’s firefighting father, who also is trying to get to the high school to see if his daughter is still alive. My favorite random thread is the live streamer who goes into this willingly thinking it’s an amusement park.
He was very wrong. There’s also the girl that wants revenge against Gwi-nam because he was blackmailing her with the video of him sexually assaulting her.
Like all of these threads are fine in theory, but the real gem in this show lies within the surviving students. I would’ve loved to see more of the archery team taking down zombies with their arrows, but here we are watching some army general rant about needing to find the cure. Show me the teenagers. That’s what I’m here for.
Overall Thoughts
It’s an entertaining show, and I’m glad I watched it. There’s a lot of talent coming from the cast of this movie, young talent that haven’t had many chances to appear in something big like this show, so I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on these youngsters. Would I rewatch the show?
Probably not. It loses too much steam by the eighth episode and I think that it became quite a drag for me to keep continuing because the stakes weren’t high anymore. I definitely also think that they set this up for a second season, and, judging by how popular it is on Netflix, that probably will be happening. Maybe I’ll watch that one. We’ll see.
