Marvel Zombies Review: Sometahms Undead Is Bettah

Plus: All the ways the buildup to Avengers Doomsday has been screwed up

Every time there’s some new piece of zombie fiction, the creative types behind it tend to say the same thing, and if you’ve read me for any length of time, you know I make fun of this constantly. Say it with me, now: “It’s not ABOUT the zombies! It’s about the CHARACTERS!”

Cool, lemme go greenlight “Night of the Living Characters” and “28 Normal Days.” It gets to the point where the characters on The Walking Dead flat-out said, “We are the walking dead!” and one of the season 1 episodes of The Last of Us had no zombies at all (a mistake they corrected in season 2 of their show based on a game about fighting fungus zombies). By the way, how are those character-specific Walking Dead spinoffs doing? I barely hear anyone talk about them. I started watching the Negan one and it was okay, but felt insufficiently enthused to pursue them all, or continue.

In the case of Marvel Zombies, though, the characters are the superheroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and we already like them. Besides, they’ve effectively fought “zombies” every time they’ve teamed up as the Avengers. Call them Chitauri, Ultron drones, or Outriders – it’ll be Doombots next – the good guys almost always face a horde of unthinking cannon fodder characters they can rip apart, en route to approaching the main evil boss(es). Marvel Zombies is no different – amid the flesh-eating masses are Scions, which are essentially zombified superheroes who retain intelligence and powers. Then there’s Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) as queen of the dead, powerful enough to occasionally look human and talk in her normal voice. That’s no spoiler if you’ve already seen the What If... zombie episode, as this is the same continuity. If you haven’t seen it, all you’ll really miss is any explanation as to why Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is now a head in a jar flown around by Doctor Strange’s cape.

Ant-Man and Spider-Man (Hudson Thames) from that episode feel shoehorned in out of obligation to continuity; the rest of the four-episode season feels more like wish fulfillment of the Young Avengers movie we hoped we would get from this phase of the MCU but didn’t. The first episode has Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) and Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) as a super-team; the second brings back Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), Katy (Awkwafina) and Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) alongside everyone’s favorite Shang-Chi supporting character...Death Dealer? In the zombie apocalypse, they’ve become a Mad Max-ish custom vehicle gang, giving Katy the annoying anime quirk of goggles on her head the whole time even when they’d actually be more effective in use.

Eventually they all team up not just with Spidey and Ant-Man, but also Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Blade who is also Moon Knight (Todd Williams doing his best Mahershala Ali, while the latter’s fellow Oscar-winner F. Murray Abraham actually does find time to deliver a couple of lines as Khonshu), and the remaining Black Widow Gang of Melina (Kari Wahlgren), Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Yelena (Florence Pugh). Give or take maybe Marc Spector, some Eternals, and the other two Marvels, this feels like the team-up we’ve been waiting for all Multiverse Saga. Especially since, because this is a parallel universe, major characters can die without fear of affecting sequel prospects.

The main plot is fairly simple, like so many other superhero stories. Get the doodad to the proper place, and it will do a thing that ensures victory, unless it doesn’t. Since we’re in a zombie apocalypse, getting anywhere is a challenge (Skrull biker gangs, y’all!), and any of the modes of transportation become highly MCU-specific, while they last. The zombies do what zombies do, though when they first attack San Francisco and unleash Pym particles, we get some fun sight gags with giant bugs, birds, and occasional people (living and otherwise). As always with this sort of thing, the fun is in the interactions – Vellani’s Ms. Marvel is a true delight as always, while Pugh and Harbour bring the energy we saw in Thunderbolts. The animation style is a bit of same old same old from What If, but while I got bored of that show mostly playing it both safe and overly connected (Howard the Duck/Darcy fanfic excepted), here it’s put in the service of what could easily have been the next Avengers movie in real life.

Like an Avengers movie after many years, however, it shares one big issue – it ends on a cliffhanger. Now, let’s qualifiy that, because people use the term too often. An unhappy ending isn’t necessarily a cliffhanger. An ending that says in the future there can be more isn’t necessarily a cliffhanger. An ending that stops in the middle of a story beat, however...one which would be resolved one way or another if the story continued at least a few more minutes...that’s a cliffhanger. If you like what led up to it as much as I did, you may not mind. Even if this is a parallel universe, its big bad has been amply set up: Wanda could show up right now in the main MCU as an evil zombie queen, and it would be a reasonable continuation of what we’ve seen from her in previous movies and shows.

Which brings me to the topic of Avengers: Doomsday, and how Marvel has completely botched the buildup...

Remember how we got Thanos? He was teased at the end of Avengers 1, was a strong supporting character in Guardians of the Galaxy, teased again at the end of Avengers 2, and when he finally showed up, we were already wondering what this giant, foreshadowed threat was going to do.

Doctor Doom has been seen from behind in one mid-credits scene. That’s it.

Oh, but Marvel will say that the plan was to build up Kang, and they had to pivot. Sorry, but let’s look at how they built up Kang. There’s He Who Remains in season 1 of Loki, and he dies. There’s evil Kang in Ant-Man 3, and he dies. There’s Victor Timely in Loki season 2, which was supposedly shot and completed before Jonathan Majors’ firing. Not only is he basically a good guy, but his storyline is resolved. How is this building up a big bad, exactly? There’s the one Ant-Man 3 mid-credits scene showing multiple Kangs, but that isn’t as scary as it might be considering the way the “Multiverse” has been handled.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse did the multiverse right. Many different universes, all with completely different aesthetics. When the MCU has done the Multiverse, what has tended to happen is that the characters spend most of their time in one parallel universe, rather than hopping to many. Doctor Strange promised us a “Multiverse of MADNESS” which basically boiled down to a more eco-friendly New York, and one destroyed realm that just has Doctor Strange left. Deadpool and Wolverine gave us a fun montage of Wolverine comics before settling in the Void, established by the Loki show. Loki should have been bouncing around many universes, but mostly it didn’t. How is this a “Multiverse saga”? The Marvels hinted at a comic-accurate X-Men universe, but instead, it looks like we’re just going to get the return of the Fox version.

The post-credits teases used to feel like they were building TO something, not just strands used to test people’s reactions to certain things. Shang-Chi ends with a scene analyzing the Ten Rings as alien in origin. Hey, could they be the rings used by the Eternals, or related to Kamala Khan’s bangles? Who knows? Moon Knight teased that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has multiple afterlifes; Thor: Love and Thunder told us all gods exist; Eternals revealed that a fascistic space judge who hates us created the world, and various shows gave us heroes with explicit religious faiths. Ms. Marvel is Muslim, Daredevil is Catholic, Moon Knight is Jewish, and Wakanda worships Bast. Were we gearing up for a war of the gods and religions?

That would have taken balls Disney clearly doesn’t have, so nope. All of the stories involving literal gods seem to have just been tossed at this point, excepting Thor.

A not insignificant part of Marvel movies’ initial appeal was that they were all parts of the same story, so much so that Kevin Feige ditched the original idea of Ant-Man and GOTG being stand-alone stories and brought them into the main narrative. It’s clear there was no plan with this last batch to integrate them down the line. We once hung on every individual movie to see how it would further the getting together of the Avengers, and then held our breath for Thanos. Considering the general public mostly never heard of Thanos, that’s impressive, and when he did show up, his motive of killing half the universe to preserve a greater good really resonated with audiences as something to discuss, for good or ill.

Mephisto could have been a great big bad to build up to in a storyline about gods; instead, he shows up in Ironheart creating a cliffhanger they may never resolve. Who could be a better big bad than Marvel’s not-quite-Satan-but-as-close-as-we’re-allowed? I liked Ironheart a lot, but Mephisto could have started dropping hints in the last Doctor Strange movie. Indeed, it was heavily rumored at the time that he would.

So Marvel Zombies, ironically enough, feels like a team-up story that’s been better set up than whatever Avengers Doomsday has in store, and gives us the interactions we’ve been wanting to see since characters like Shang-Chi were introduced. It could have been canon, since Doctor Strange established that zombies can exist in the main MCU. Though it switches some origins around, maybe it can still be your head-canon. Zeb Wells is best known for writing Robot Chicken, as well as some actual Marvel comics, but it’s clear that he gets it in a way that maybe Marvel Studios executives have forgotten (satirists usually do know their subjects better than most); he also cowrote Deadpool & Wolverine, one episode of She-Hulk, and did an uncredited pass on The Marvels. Let him write a new movie from scratch, now that it’s clear he doesn’t just do comedy.

Can Robert Downey Jr. in a green hood do better? The metal gauntlet is officially thrown down.

Marvel Zombies debuts on Disney+ right now. All images courtesy of Disney/Marvel Studios.

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